Which 1070 (or 1060) for relatively quiet gaming?

This is a gift for my brother.

First of all, is it worth the price premium to go for a 1070 vs. the 1060? I thought with the 1070 ti out now the prices would come down. It's mainly to play Overwatch right now, but who knows what in the future. He don't have a 4k monitor, so it's for 1080p gaming.

Whichever card I get, how do you decide between all the different makes? MSI, Gigabyte, etc. Plus there are different memory sizes for them. What about the founders edition?

Should I buy now or are they expected to drop in price before Christmas?

The more fans it got - the louder the card is. (mostly)

I would go with water cooling / dual / single fan solution if you want quiet. I would go with EVGA ICX - best performance and noise level.

First, I'd say to avoid most of the reference (Single blower-style) coolers as they tend to be louder than third-party 2 or 3 fan cooling by default.

For what its worth, The Gigabyte brand of cards with the 2 or 3 fan coolers in the GTX 1070 and 1080 line have a feature where the fans stay off until the cards pcb temperature raises above 49* C. I honestly don't even notice the fans (on my GTX 1080) as the temperatures sit below 75*C on most games so the fans only ramp up half-way (if even).

Then again, on my build, noise isn't a factor for me. Hell, I specifically replaced the stock coolermaster hyper 212 fan with a Delta one that spins above 3000 rpm above 40 decibels when on load. But I have mine controlled with pwm.

basics are the bigger than fan the quieter it is as it moves more air per round than smaller ones do, bigger seals also dissipate heat more effectively, so if you don't overclock most of the big 2fan /3fan cards from 1060 and 1070 series are fairly quiet due modest power draw, heck my msi gaminx x 1080ti is fairly quiet running on stock settings, doubt the smaller chips with the same cooling solutions would be louder

Any model with 2 or 3 fans with the "Zero dB" option (almost all models have it). From what I remember MSI Gaming X cooler has some pretty huge fans and is very quiet, there's also Gainward Phoenix, and Asus 3 fan model (Strix or whatever they call it). If you can afford GTX 1070 go for it, GTX 1060 is good, too, but only 6GB version. Friend has Gainward GTX 1070, at 1080p the fans don't even spin in some games, at 1440p 144Hz it's a different story.

1060 (6GB) for 1080p, 1070 for 1440p.

Bigger the fans, the quieter. Don't get any founders editions or anything with a blower-style fan if you want quiet. MSI cards typically have large fans and from what I've seen are quiet.

I don't know about prices. I feel like they probably wont drop across the board, maybe a deal here and there. Probably not a big enough difference to matter.

I see some MSI cards with a 3 fan design. Would those be quiet?

1060 6gb for 1080p gaming.

1070 because the number is larger