Looking for a quiet but powerful card

I'm considering getting a new card to replace my (surprisingly quiet) Sapphire 4870 512MB card in my 3XS P55 liteDAW system - looking to combine a step-up in power with a card that's as quiet as possible. At the moment I'm torn between something like Gigabyte's 1Gig GTX 460 OC, which I know has a lot of fans on this forum, or maybe spend a little more for a Radeon 6870 (which seem to be pretty quiet too).

Any views as to which way you'd balance budget, power and noise levels greatly appreciated.

This page of a hexus review has the noise measurements of a wide range of new cards. If the noise levels of those cards isn't low enough then it might be worth looking at aftermarket cooling.

Cheers - not quite sure how I could have missed that one. I suppose old age must be catching up with me. Frankly, anything under around 44dB would be fine - so that leaves a lot of potential. Still, that Gigabyte SOC looks very promising ... although now I'm starting to wonder about the power draw.

Does anyone have experience with the 6870s? Is any brand particularly quiet (last time I looked everyone seemed to be using the standard cooler)?

Ta!

as far as I know, all 6870's are reference at the moment - can't remember the reasoning, but it seems pretty much every 6850 is non-reference (is there even a reference card??) but no sign yet of better coolers factory fitted on 6870's.

I'm thinking about after market cooling as, to me, the 6870 is a bit too loud. But I'm running >1 monitor so at idle the GPU clocks only drop to 300 rather than 100/150mhz, and the ram speed doesn't drop at all even on the desktop. But I do like it quiet - the card is by no means a wind turbine.

I have the Gigabyte card and its really quiet. I've run quite a few graphics intensive games like Crysis, Metro 2033 and Stalker and I've never heard it running. I've been really impressed with it and, bearing in mind that the rest of my system is quiet (H50 CPU cooler), it will be a good fit for you.
And the SOC version looks great. Almost wish I had waited a little longer - its always the way with tech :)

Terrible isn't it? I keep reminding myself that if I'd kept waiting for the thing "just around the corner" I'd probably still be working on a BBC Model B.

Pretty much any of the gigabyte cards with the windforce heatsink/fan assemblies should be worth a look.

You can spot them quite easily in photos, or check gigabytes site for exact model numbers.

I would look at the GB OC rather than the SOC, I pushed my 1GB to 845 core/1690 shader/4400 memory with no voltage increase which outperforms a stock 470 ;) Its still damn quiet and only hits 67C after some heavy gaming. Quiet was my key choise also as my entire system was built around that :)

Cheers for the tips. Time to go and spend some cash then ... Gigabyte here I come.

Gigabyte do bin their GPUs (the gauntlet program) so the more expensive models do theoretically have better OCing potential if that's what your after.