On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 09:33:30 -0800 VDR User user.vdr@gmail.com wrote:
It's a bad assumption to say lesser expensive gt220 cards have cheap and noisy fans. It's simply not true.
I've bought many graphics cards over the years and every time one came with a fan it's been noisy and I've replaced it with an aftermarket cooler with a bigger heatsink, and either a bigger fan(s) or no fan.
People have different standards of noisy. If everyone was as demanding as me they wouldn't have considered using an XBox as a media player!
The pictures of these cards are enough for me, I'm sticking to my assumption that if I bought a GT220 I'd have to budget for either getting a specialist model with silent cooler, or replacing the cooler myself.
Maybe a better idea is to not assume anything at all, but rather actually look up real life data or just buy one and see for yourself (as I did). There's no reason to take guesses about any of this stuff, plenty of users have posts their results and specs at various forums. A good place to start would be nvnews.net and read the thread "VDPAU testing tool".
The results don't give the right information to determine how well a card can handle 1080i.