Need opinions on video cards with passive cooling

[ZedX3]

My dad is looking at building a new system and he wants to make it as quiet as possible.

He is considering the XFX 512MB 7950GT that has fan-less, passive cooling.

I recommended the 512 MB 7950GT's from eVGA and BFG which have a traditional fan set up.

What is the consensus on passive cooling? I searched a little bit and didn't come up with much.

Any reason why he should he steer clear of the fan-less XFX card?

All three brands are good, IMO, but he is really obsessed with making this thing silent.

It will be going into an Antec Sonata II case with a 550w SeaSonic, Core 2 Duo, and ASUS mobo with 2 GB of Corsair XMS DDR2, and a Sound Blaster X-Fi, btw...

Thanks!

[clroberts]

I have looked in the PC magazines on passive cooling systems and the one they had in the magazine used some sort of gizmo heatsink that stuck out of the case. Their opinion was that it did not do too well. If your dad is concerned with noise, why doesn't he consider water cooling. That tends to work much better.

[hitchface]

Water cooling can leak though...I wouldn't want to get my new 7950 anywhere near water.

Having an all heatsink setup (I think) would be a bad idea. If you were to go with heatsinks on everything, at least get 2 nice n quiet fans in front and back to move the air. If it just heats up and sits there, his quiet system will fry. You need some kind of exhaust system going, and there are plenty of fans out there that are inaudible.

If it were a perfect world, you could get a monsterous case and get 2 of those Antec Big Boy fans...dead silent on low/med.