A Fanless Graphics Card from ASUS
mikemuch writes "ASUS has come out with the Extreme N6600GT Silencer/HTD, a GeForce 6600GT without any cooling fan. It's sort of odd looking, with heat sinks that fold on a hinge. Great for home theater since it's silent. Loyd Case of ExtremeTech has put it through a rigorous bunch of benchmarks."
Gigabyte has been selling a fanless 6600GT for a while now, the GV-NX66T256D.
I have a 6600GT with a fan, and it isn't loud at all. Just put up with it. You'll never notice the sound difference unless you don't have any other fans in your computer. If you don't have any fans in your computer, you're fried. Water cooling units make noise, unless you have a Zalman reserator. Let the enthusiasts have their fun...
I just built an AMD X2 3800 system with the 6600 (non-GT) Silencer for my wife, who is not a video game player, and it is cool, quiet, cheap and plenty fast for what she needs. Combined with the Antec Sonata II case it makes for probably the nicest Linux system I have ever put together.
I have a PCI Express version of the card in my rig, and it is nice. Gets too hot to touch after running GPU-intensive applications, but those NV chips should be designed to run hot (and they have a thermal protection which throttles down the GPU if it gets overheated).
Nice to see other manufacturers to notice that people like to have their computers silent.