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 Nvidia GeFroce GTX 280 or ATI Radeon HD 4870 are consuming upwards of 200W when in use. This is simply too much to ask of silent coolers, and will require quite a bit of effort to cool quietly.
However, there are some reasonable video cards out there that can handle silent or even fanless cooling. Don't expect to be able to turn on features such as 8x AntiAliasing, or run full HD resolutions with them, but if you want silence, these are about as good as it gets.
So if you're building a new silent PC and need a new video card, here are some good ones I have picked out. Otherwise if you have your own and want to cool it silently, read on below.
As of late 2008, the fastest video card with a fanless cooler is the ATI Radeon HD 4850 from Gigabyte. They are the only ones willing to slap a fanless cooler on this video card - everyone else uses a large heatsink and fan. They are able to achieve this because they are using a specially designed heatpipe cooler that would be far too difficult to install as a retail product. This thing is HUGE, and takes up a lot of space in system, so make sure you have enough room if you go this way. If you want a great gaming card that runs silent out of the box, this is THE card to get.
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.
If you are not planning on gaming at all, and can do with a slightly less robust (or even an older) video card that isn't already silent, you would do well to go with the VF900. This cooler is still pretty big (it will take up the slot that is adjecent to the video card slot) but the fan is even quieter than the one above (18.5 dBA in silent mode). Most people will want to get one of these, and just leave it in silent mode. I promise you won't even hear it's there ;)
We're almost there! Now that our video card is taken care of, let's see what we can do with that huge loud power supply you probably have ;)
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