Passive/quiet graphics card?

[MarkRSi]

About half a year ago my 6600GT's fan packed in without me realising and I still wonder if the '140' reading was in celsius and not fahrenheit... Anyway I replaced the fan which provides sufficent cooling, however its quite noisy and I think the damage has already been done as the system occasionally locks up when playing games or playing with the nVidia settings.

I've been considering getting a passive/fanless graphics card i.e.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/productinfo.asp?Web...

Are these worthwhile? My motherboard has a nVidia chipset so nVidia would be preferred unless an ATi would offer better value? I heard the 9-series nVidias are supposed to be much better, but don't really need cutting edge performance (thats what the 360s for), the games I play on the PC are mostly Live for Speed, Half Life 2 and probably Battlefield Heroes when its released. Wouldn't want to spend more than £50 if possible. Any suggestions?

[Tunku]

I've got a pair of fanless MSi 7900GS's in my system, these ones http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=proddesc&prod_no=1038&maincat_no=130&cat2_no=136 
No noise, and with a couple of noiseless side casing fans blowing on the radiators, run at about 45-50 c when gaming.

[JonRB]

There are plenty of fanless solutions around.

XFX have a range of cards branded Fatal1ty that use heat-pipe technology. I put a 8600GT one of these in my son's machine and he has been pretty happy with it. Plays Crysis in modest details settings quite adequately, so can't be too bad.