AMD ATI Radeon HD 4770 Review

Very frustrating. The review is for a card that sounds great, especially in the quiet department, "on the whole this card was incredibly quiet with it being whisper quiet when idling and for most of the time when under load as well". It *GASP*, actually improves the cooling in a system by sucking air through the GPU and pumping it out the back. Alas this isn't the card you can buy, the ones available for sale seem to have a radically poorer cooler design. Just a fan, in most cases the heat is circulated in a small area blocked on 5 sides by the case bottom, case back, motherboard, case side, and of course the GPU itself.

So while the reviewed card should make it relatively easy to have a silent desktop, the cards you can actually buy are likely to be much worse. I'd hope that in the future that trusted reviews would review video cards we can actually buy. I see 8 vendors or so in stock at newegg, none like the reviewed card.

If noice is an issue - use passive coled graphics cards.
I use ASUS - and play fps-games (Bioshock, GTA4, Battlefiels etc.) with no problems...
Inspiration:
http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/std/category=Quiet_Video_Cards.html
http://www.silentpcreview.com/asus-en9400gt-silent

Regards Jens Kjærsgaard