Silent video cards are tricky business, as unlike processors, they are getting hotter and are consuming more power every day.

The fact is, you can really only have one thing or the other - either a top end gaming video card, or a silent one with moderate performance. The top video cards today, like the ATI Radeon HD 58xx and 59xx series are consuming upwards of 250-300W when in use (and still around 150W at idle!). Then there is the GTX 480 by Nvidia, which tops out at over 420W!. This is simply too much to ask of silent coolers, and will require quite a bit of effort to cool quietly.

It's tough these days to get an actual gaming card that is silent out of the box. It was pretty common as little as 2 or 3 years ago. But with today's hot GPU's, gaming has left OEM silent cooling behind. So, you'll have to cool your own card. Here's how:

Cool Your Own Card

If you already have a decent card, and are looking to swap the loud dual slot cooler for something a little more refined, most of these will work on most video cards, if enough care is taken to provide the system with sufficient airflow. Zalman's video card coolers are so successful that most manufacturers have been using their designs on their own quiet video cards.

With four high-performance heatpipes and patented variable fin profile technologies, the GV1000 is the only cooler I would consider putting on a higher end video card, like the GeForce 9800GTX or Radeon 4000 series. It is 100% copper, and thick enough to take up 2 slots, but many of even the noisiest video cards are big and heavy anyway. The difference here is no space is wasted, as you can easily see. No fancy graphics or anything like that - just a ton of copper and a single fan that spins at 1650 RPM, making just 20 dbA. With the included fan controller, you can easily crank the fan up when playing games (after all, you don't really need silence when playing games, right?).

The Silent Solution

It's not much to look at, but the Arctic Cooling Accelero S2 really gets the job done in quite a wide variety of video cards. No, you don't want to put this on a Radeon 4870 or a GeForce GTX 280, but it will do the job on most others, and at a fraction of the cost of a Zalman cooler. Not a lot of retailers carry these, but if you can find one for under $25, you'll have yourself a very nice video card cooler that is absolutely silent.

Silent Motherboards?

If you are running a Silent PC for home theatre purposes, I am happy to tell you that the time is finally here where you will get excellent HTPC performance from an integrated chipset. Both Intel and AMD have chipsets with integrated GPUs that will decode all formats on the fly, meaning smooth HDTV playback without the need for a hot CPU at all.

On the Intel side, you will be looking at an H55 motherboard, to be used with a Core i5 CPU.

If you're more into AMD, then your best bet is something based on the 785G chipset, to be used with an Athlon II CPU (trust me, Athlon II is plenty when you have hardware video decoding)

Next Page: Silent Power Supplies