Can anyone recommend a quiet graphics card upgrade for me? At the moment I have an Asus Radeon 4670 and have modified the fan from always-maximum-noise and replaced with a big slow fan so it makes no noise. (Thankfully the heatsink is simple vanes and I was able to screw inbetween the vanes to fix the fan.)
I'd like something that is basically completely inaudible at idle - it can spin up faster under 3D load, don't care when I'm gaming - hence it doesn't need to be completely passive. (I've seen a passive Gigabyte Radeon 4850 but at £150 it's a bit steep compared to better performing cards - e.g. 9800GTX+ at £115. That's a fall-back plan at the moment)
It needs to fit within 2 slots as I have a micro-ATX board and my X-Fi needs to fit two-slots-down from the graphics card, as that's the bottommost of the 2 PCI slots. Hence monsterous cooling solutions are out.
Unfortunately the last couple of graphics cards I've had have been maximum-fan-with-no-control monsters. Just bad luck I suppose, but it'd be nice to know in advance that a card is properly quiet when idle - preferably without having to fiddle with fan settings manually before starting a game up.
I'd like something that is basically completely inaudible at idle - it can spin up faster under 3D load, don't care when I'm gaming - hence it doesn't need to be completely passive. (I've seen a passive Gigabyte Radeon 4850 but at £150 it's a bit steep compared to better performing cards - e.g. 9800GTX+ at £115. That's a fall-back plan at the moment)
It needs to fit within 2 slots as I have a micro-ATX board and my X-Fi needs to fit two-slots-down from the graphics card, as that's the bottommost of the 2 PCI slots. Hence monsterous cooling solutions are out.
Unfortunately the last couple of graphics cards I've had have been maximum-fan-with-no-control monsters. Just bad luck I suppose, but it'd be nice to know in advance that a card is properly quiet when idle - preferably without having to fiddle with fan settings manually before starting a game up.
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