I have this card and the fan never gets really loud at all even during benchmark loops where I am not using headphones. its just slightly louder than my gtx260. it does have a little whine to it a one certain spot but it only hits that spot for couple of seconds when its slowly ramping up or down. and that is with me trying hard to listen for it. in dead silent room, you will hear any card. my cpu fan and case fans are actually louder than my gpu fan is at idle for sure.The more I read about the evga 570 I see lot of people complaining about the fan noise, this would drive me nuts.
I just purchased the Gigabyte 570 and it runs quieter than my old 6850. If running silent is important than this is the card you want.
I meant is it running with the stock fan profile, not stock clocks 🙂. MSI Afterburner allows you to change the fan profile, so if the temperatures allow for it, the card could be even quieterThe card already comes overclocked at 780 MHz stock and it's still quieter than my system fans at idle. It does get louder at load but I don't hear it over the game volume. I haven't bothered to overclock it beyond 780

Spinejam is that a 200MHz overclock 😀. Nice. That's a beast of a card
Looks like I'm set on the Gigabyte for the silence factor. In my history with video cards I almost end up throwing my computer against a wall when it starts making loud noises.
Can I vote against all GTX 570s? A card of that class should have at least 2gb of vram IMO, especially if you're considering SLI.
Well, if you look at it, 1.5gb of vram is optimum for a card like the GTX 580. The problem is, if you were to SLI a pair of them, they would need 3gb of vram on each of them to maintain a relationship whereby the GPU could make use of the frame buffer in an ideal way.See, I was wondering about that very thing - how important is the vram? There is a 2 gb 570 out there, but it's like $400, and I don't know if that makes sense or not...