On the other hand, MSI has a 8600GTS with what looks to be much beefier passive cooler.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127287

Methinks I may be checking this out. Wonder how it will do stuffed into a rather cramped mATX case....

Still have the squealing cards? Tell Gigabyte I don't mind having no warranty, and I'll be happy to put super glue on the chokes myself. :)

Yeah, I got one of these.

its hot (literally), really really hot. You'd think Gigabyte would put a small temperature controlled fan on there which would activate at load.
Just recently I was playing a game, the screen froze and the computer went unresponsive, my first thought was "bloody video card", so I decided to touch it (freakin' genius) and scolded my finger.

as an aside, why do they put all the good looking parts of a video card on the bottom, where you can't generally see them.

Higher power consumption on passively cooled parts probably isn't due to how the power is delivered.

Static power leakage through the gates (roughly) doubles for every 10c of temperature, so as the temperatures rise, so does the power consumption.

106c under load? Must be a typo. I'm using the 7600GT with Silent Pipe 2 and under load it hasn't gone over 55c. But my case has a huge 220mm side case fan and two fans in back with one fan in front doing major cooling.

Hot enough to boil water=too hot. I'll pass.

I hope the silent trend catches on. After so many years of running overclocked, super-cooled machines at any decibel cost, I want something quiet now.

I built a SFF system for a friend of mine last year and my graphics card choice was determined by which vendor offered passive cooling. I don't mind the card running a little hot. With adequate system cooling, the warm air gets whisked away, and I'm not concerned with electrostatic migration harming a gaming GPU that has a usable life of a couple of years to begin with.

Whining sounds are usually down to components, or possibly the wrong component for a design but can usually be fixed by sourcing proper parts. Good to see Gigabyte has done so. Now where's the passively-colled 2600-series? They would seem to be better for HTPCs given their superior video playback...probably worse for bigscreen gaming though.

The only thing I hate about this is...the fact that I actually PAID for SupCom! (although it was at a sale price) It seems like that damn game is the bundle-whore of 2007 :(

Good to hear (no pun intended) that it was just a component issue rather than some design feature of the card. Luckily the one I tested did not apparently come from that batch, as it was dead silent.

I have one of the 8600 GT's running in my HTPC, a Shuttle SD11G5. It PERFECTLY fits into the G5 chassis, and I've found that it's adequately cooled by the single fan in the Shuttle. It makes for great HDTV WoW, too. ;)