1) Are there any passively cooled products to consider (or do these modern GPUs use so many Watts and give off too much heat to make passive cooling impractical/impossible)?
2) If I have to get an air-cooled GPU, which will be the quietest for 2D use only (I do a lot of Photoshop and won't be gaming on this PC, so I'll probably never push this card to full load... it may however get warm even in 2D use because I plan to throttle back all of the case fans and CPU fans to silent profiles). So I worry that if I look at 2D "idle" noise measurements alone that it won't reflect reality if the case heat causes my GPU fans to increase RPM.
The cards I have been looking at so far include:
- ASUS ENGTX570 DCII/2DIS/1280MD5 GeForce GTX 570 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit
Galaxy 58NLH5HS3PXZ GeForce GTX 580 (Fermi) 1536MB 384-bit
SPARKLE Calibre X570 GeForce GTX 570 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit
MSI N570GTX Twin Frozr III PE/OC GeForce GTX 570 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit
MSI N560GTX-Ti Hawk GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit
I do not want to purchase and install an aftermarket cooler to my GPU, looking for off-the-shelf turn-key solutions only. Please do not suggest an ATI/AMD card because I want the CUDA support built into the nvidia cards for Adobe.