New Video Card Recommendations for Battlefield 3

Wishmaster said:

pparks,
If you want it a bit cooler under full load and you do not mind a little extra noise, you could always set a more aggresive custom fan profile using eVGA Precision.
Although 80-85C is usually considered normal for these cards under full load & should be fine, I always liked to keep mine a bit cooler.

Yeah, I prefer to keep the box as quiet as possible. Since that amount of heat is right in the normal range for this particular card series, I'm not bothered in the least. In the event that something happened to this card heat related, I'd simply take advantage of the lifetime warranty provided by eVGA. In watching the card this morning with evga precision it's idling about 8 degrees cooler than yesterday. It's running around 32C

Wishmaster said:

So you liking the card overall so far I take it?

Yes, 100% satisfied with my purchase thus far. Going to check out some video rendering speeds today and see what my improvement is there.

Edit: No improvement in video rendering. That kinda stinks. But the Sony software doesn't utilize CUDA very heavily I guess and I didn't realize that my 9800GTX+ had CUDA support. In fact, my render times are a bit slower...but I would guess this has more to do with the current Nvidia 285.38 beta drivers that I am running for BF3 beta at the moment.

Yea, the default profile is very good in terms of noise.
Just a bit warm for my liking, but as you said ... it is normal and will not harm the cards.

eVGA warranties and support is just amazing, so in the worst case scenario they have your back.

I regards to to the Cuda encoding I wish I could offer advice, but always use CPU based encoding myself so not that familiar.

It should be faster though.
Very well may be the driver, or other setting ...

Apparently, Sony Vegas Movie Studio only partially uses GPU encoding. According to Sony, it would only improve performance by 5% to 15%. When I timed my new card, re-encoding 1 minute of video took about 5:20 seconds using just CPU, and about 4:00 to do the same with GPU assistance. Previously, I would finish this in about 3:35. So, I lost about 25 seconds somewhere along the line. I don't do enough encoding that this extra time is really worth me hunting down. I usually start it up and walk away for hours.

The differences between the eVGA 570's is the heat sink design more than anything. I went with the reference design layout with the fan at one end, and the shroud covering all of the electrical bits on the card and everything exhausting out the back.

96accord said:

Thanks for all the help. Even though I didn't go with the GTX card

No problem, you have to go with what works for you. Nothing wrong with the AMD/ATI cards.