My laptop (HP hdx16t) sits in my bedroom as my office just got taken over by my new son That said i can leave it on (for video processing or mozy backups) only if i turn off the fan in my external HD enclosure, turn the power and fan control on the laptop down so that they don't come on (or overheat), and cover all the little lights on the laptop that i can't turn off. Even so it is usually not silent enough for my wife.

So i am kind of planing out a possible desktop system that is extremely silent and am running into the great lack of passively cooled GPUs. At this point, working a custom liquid cooled solution to a GPU is out of my comfort level, so i want to stick pretty much to off the shelf components. I do some gaming, but don't care about being able to max out every game. I do a large amount of photo/video editing, so I really would like DirectX 11 support as it allows for greater GPU usage (particularly down the road) by some of the programs i have (adobe CS/premier)

I found this that matches "features" but is pretty underpowered for my needs:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...e=silent_graphics_card-_-14-121-365-_-Product

The best passively cooled GPU i could find is
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125282


It doesn't have DirectX 11 support though (which would kind of limit me to a ATI 5000 series card). Anyone have other options they have seen or know about? Or can convince me that i don't need DirectX 11 at the moment?

Anyone out there with ideas?

Just found a silent 5750 card. I would really like a 5770 or greater, but this is definitely an option.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131300