Fast, quiet video card? (passive cooling preferred)

[IronWing]

I'm looking to upgrade my monitor (probably to a Dell U2412M) and figure it might be a good time to upgrade the video card on my silent desktop (Puget Serenity) as well. I currently have a passively cooled Powercolor Radeon 5770 card.

The case has plenty of space for large heat sinks.

I do a bit of FPS gaming and would like all the eye candy to look good. I have only one monitor and do not expect to ever run more than one. Overclocking doesn't interest me.

I have no brand preference though I would like a good quality card.

 

[Teizo]

MSI's Gaming series cards are extremely quiet. They are not passively cooled, but they are inaudible in windows and barely make a peep during gaming.

 

[exar333]

Fast and passively cooled? Not going to find that unless you build something custom.

If you want 'good enough' and passively-cooled, that is still tough to find.

 

[biostud]

Any asus dc II cooler based card, just set a custom fan profile.

 

[BrightCandle]

You can't have both with air cooling. You can have the top end card with inaudible fans so long as you are willing to spend about £400 on a custom water to cool the machine. Then you can spread the heat a top end card produces over 3 120mm fans at 800rpm, never hear them and get absolutely top performance.

 

[bystander36]

I have seen passive cooler before, which are generally very big and don't cool the card as well, BUT all the heat that leaves the card still needs to be removed from the case, which means case fans. There is going to be fans involved in any system. Even water cooling requires the radiator to be cooled.

 

[IronWing]

I found a 7750 1Gb card that is passively cooled and noticed in the rating thread that the 7750 1Gb card is rated substantially faster than the 2Gb and 4Gb varieties. Why is that?

 

[Roland00Address]

I found a 7750 1Gb card that is passively cooled and noticed in the rating thread that the 7750 1Gb card is rated substantially faster than the 2Gb and 4Gb varieties. Why is that?

Because most 7750 that are 2 or 4gb are ddr3 models and not gddr5. If they are ddr3 models you get 25.6 GBs of bandwidth instead of 72 GBs of bandwidth. To put that in comparison that is the same memory bandwidth if you are running an integrated graphics with ddr3 1600 mhz chips in dual channel.