Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 9800GT 1 GB PCI-Express Video Card GV-N98TSL-1GI

Comment: This new video card, released by NVIDIA only in late 2009, is unusual because it is a high performance video card which uses a fanless design. Those two characteristics (high performance and a fanless design) are generally contradictory for video cards: as video cards become ever more capable, their VPU's (the onboard video processing unit, a CPU dedicated video tasks) generate tremendous amounts of heat. This means that you will find a slew of high performance video cards on the market today, but all of them with the requisite, and often oversized, cooling fan. Fans are OK, but fans make noise, and often lots of it. This video card by NVIDIA gets us past fan noise by employing an extensive passive cooling system consisting of copper and aluminum heat pipes and cooling fins to passively transfer and dissipate heat from the VPU to the air.

How did NVIDIA achieve this? Well, the passive cooling system on this card is physically enormous. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. The card easily takes us twice the physical space of a traditional video card, taking over two PCI slots (the card is only plugged into one PCI slot, but is so physically thick that the card protrudes over the space on top of the next closest PCI slot). The design therefore allows for the implementation of a high performance card that is completely silent in operation. Really cool.

The caveat? This is a great video card with lots of processing power likely only to be taxed by the most extreme end of gaming software, but you have to have the PHYSICAL space in your computer to hold the card. On a full size system, the NVDIA GeFOrce 9800GT is is likely not going to be a problem, but on some size-reduced systems (and in other systems where the internal configuration is cramped) there may be installation difficulties. (You can read some of the comments online where a few users just couldn't get the card to fit into their system.) The card, too, because of its processing power, requires a secondary power connection using the supplied power cables (i.e., the card draws power both from the PCI slot and ALSO by the supplementary power cable), so you'll have to have a spare power plug available, or make one available using a cable splitter.

How about the features of the card itself? This is a powerful video card, with 1 Gb (!) of DDR3 (!) RAM, a PCI-E 2.0 interface (bus speed 16), and maximum resolution of 2560 x 1536. The card is laden with high end capabilities, including a 112-stream processor, "Ultra Duarble VGA" for extended life, dual-link DVI, Shader Model 4.0, PureVideo HD, PhyX Gaming Technology, and more. Although the card is built around the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT GPU, not the absolute latest VPU on the market, the configuration and specification of the card makes it easily fit into the "high end" video system category. There should be little that one can ask of a video system that this card will not be able to handle without even taxing it (with the exception of the the latest 3D video games, but which it should also admirably handle).

The card comes with a set of supplied cable accessories, including the six-pin power supply cable and an HDMI adapter. Drivers are available for virtually every version of Windows, including both 32-bit and 64-bit drivers for Windows 7 and Windows Vista. I am running my card in a system using Winodws 7 64-bit, and have encountered no difficulties thus far. Performance is excellent across a wide range of video tasks, and my Windows Graphics and Gaming Experience numbers are both checked in at 6.8. Another really nice touch is that the card provides all three main interface plug types: DVI, HDMI, and VGA.

This card has a somewhat high retail price, but Amazon's price at about $130 makes this a great deal. If it fits in your desktop, don't miss out on it. And, enjoy the silence!