Now, when I think fanless video card, I find myself thinking that the card itself must be a low-end piece of you know what. But as it turns out, I was actually wrong about this assumption. Check it out:

If you’re building a badass gaming rig or overclocker’s dream system, you might be willing to put up with a little noise. After all, an overclocked GeForce 7800 GTX might need a beefier cooling fan than a stock solution. And large power supplies can sometimes be noisy.

But sometimes, you just want a little silence. For example, if you’re building a home-theater PC, you’ll want as quiet a system as possible. After all, harsh fan noise isn’t exactly compatible with watching Shakespeare in Love.

But you don’t want to sacrifice too much performance. There are a number of passively cooled Geforce 6200 based cards, for example, but they can’t handle high-definition video decoding well. Some number of passively cooled 128MB Geforce 6600s also exist. They do a fine job with video stuff, but you plan on doing any 3D gaming, then their performance is limited. [Read the rest]