XFX Thicc III Silent Bios Mode

SamtheMan101 · July 13, 2020

Recently, I've upgraded my computers fans to all of be quiets Silent wings 3. And the noise levels while gaming has become great. Unfortunately, my Graphics card, the XFX Thicc III ramps up quite loudly even with headphons on, at 35% rpm. Is there a way to minimise the sound without butchering thermals at the same time? Playing around with the fan speeds in AMD Radeon software isn't giving me quite the perfect balance, and there are other options of under volting which I have no idea how to use. Does anyone have any experience in lowering noise levels without sacrificing performance or graphics quality?

Mister Woof · July 13, 2020

bottom line is

noise or cooling, pick one

some models do it better than others, but XFX isn't one of the amazing ones.

Chris Pratt · July 13, 2020

Not really. Fans make noise. It's always a trade-off between thermals and noise. If you reduce performance, you also reduce thermals, meaning the fans don't have to work as hard and are thus more quiet. That's literally what the slient mode BIOS does. It cuts the clocks and the voltage, so the card runs cooler, with less fan noise.

SamtheMan101 · July 13, 2020

Then theres no alternative. I heard something about the Strix Cards having good noise levels without sacrificing performance. Might need to do some research on them when my next graphics card upgrade comes around.

Chris Pratt · July 13, 2020

There doesn't seem to be one best or worst brand for this across the board. It also depends on a lot of different factors. Take for example 5600XT. Most were configured with fans from 5700XT cards, because it usually costs more to reconfigure the card layout and fan setup when you can just keep the same fab across both and swap the chip and VRAM. Because of that, the 5600XTs usually run really quiet because the fans don't have to ramp up much more than 35% under full load, in order to keep it cool. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the 2060 KO essentially threw the 2060 in a 1660 body, with underpowered fans for the more powerful GPU. That thing sounds like a lawnmower. Then, even among the same product lines, the different manufactures all make their own marks with varying levels of success.

The best thing to do is just read/watch reviews and see which ones have the best performance/noise ratio for the line you're interested in.