Hi, TEK!
I use my computer mostly for music production and I need my PC to be as silent as possible, but I also want to play some games after the work is done.
What graphics card would you suggest? Is there a GPU out there which is silent when not intensely used and just louder when used intensely? All the programs used in music production could easily run on the integrated intel graphics on my CPU.
Greetings from Riga, Latvia,
Mimicus.
Depends on what your budget is and what games you play. If you have a large budget and play anything demanding, http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-186-GW&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1402 - Fastest single GPU card at the moment, and has no fans = silence, but probably overkill for what you want. That would be my choice of card, though.
It has fans behind the heat fins, 3 to be exact, but any non reference cooler will be pretty quiet.
The budget is about 150$ and I want to play AC4, Civ5 and no first-person shooters. It probably should have only one fan because of my computer case.
So it does, completely missed them. Spent most my time drueling at the cooler when I saw it at launch and missed the fans behind it. /slaps self
Alot of HIS Digital cards are super ultra quiet...
If you're willing to do some modding, you could take this 7850 and put an arctic passive cooler. Just make sure you've got good airflow, and this pretty much rules out OCing
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/xfx-video-card-fx785acnl4
http://www.amazon.com/ARCTIC-Accelero-Plus-VGA-Cooler/dp/B0063VTXFS/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1381879141&sr=8-3&keywords=accelero