Since I don't game much, as soon as APUs get good enough I'd like to eliminate a GPU altogether. I had sort of hoped that with the move to 28nm the idle temps for something like a 7770 or even 7850 would be low enough to have the fan silent on 2D stuff, but no. A pity maybe next time. Irony is that AMD did very well with the power gating on Llano and even Bulldozer. Guess proper 2D silence from a graphics card involves having a dedicated 2D part and enough RAM for the framebuffer onchip running at a lower voltage and 'instant' switching between the two.
Thing is my desktop has a fairly quiet Seasonic PSU, a reasonable Arctic Cooling Freezer7 so the only thing making noise is the GPU which hardly gets used.
Strangely enough, rumours point to Nvidia having good thermals this time. But since I don't want to buy Nvidia again...