Two video cards necessity or luxury?
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I use 2 gtx470's in my system. A lot of the noise depends on your cooling system. In a cubix box they're virtually silent. In my PC you can hear them a bit when running at full. I'd say it sounds more like a PS3 maybe than an xbox. The 480's can sound as bad as an xbox. I am of course relating it to my first gen xbox 360, which were incredibly loud. Just bought one of the new ones last night and I think my 470's are quieter than that too.
System 1: EVGA gtx470 1280Mb and MSI gtx470 1280 in Cubix Xpander for Octane, AMD 945, 4Gb Ram
All systems are at stock speeds and settings.
All systems are at stock speeds and settings.
I don't have an xbox or ps3 so I can't compare, but I can tell you is damm noisy, and I've had some noisy fans in the past, at render my 470 is at 90ºC stable and almost full speed fan (its summer here, and pretty hot outside) so it's kind of annoying, althou not so much that I can't work. What I usually do is I setup the scenes and then batch render the lot, so I've got my GPU rendering for a couple of days non-stop, that way it'll render at nights too so I wont have to hear it so much, 
Right now I kind of regret not waiting for 460 to come out (althou I didnt know at the time they were planned), and I'm guessing that some time in the near future I might buy one to use for render while I'm working.
Right now I kind of regret not waiting for 460 to come out (althou I didnt know at the time they were planned), and I'm guessing that some time in the near future I might buy one to use for render while I'm working.
windows 7 x64 | 2xGTX570 (warming up the planet 1ºC at a time) | i7 920 | 12GB