Please Help Deciding Graphics Card

Hi,
I am new here to this forums.
I am planning to get i7 and 4GB DDR2/DDR3 1022Mhz RAM.
I have an 17" LCD.

Please suggest me a suitable graphics card for my system.I am thinking of 260GTX.Budget around $300 USD (or INR Rs 15,000). 1 more thing is that it should be silent, (my 8600 gt makes a lot of noise).

Thank you

 

You won't find a silent high end card.

The GTX260 is a good choice.

 

oh this is so sad........i thought atleast brands like EVGA or MSI would feature silent 260GTX............

 

If they exist, i havent seen one. The chips are just too hot to be passively cooled, atleast cheaply.

the only silent solution would be watercooling im afraid, atleast at the moment.

 

Err what would be the approx cost for 260GTX with watercooling? (Sorry i am completely new to these videocards)..?

 

I guess it depends on what you call silent.
You probably won't find a high-end card that is completely silent but you may find one with an aftermarket cooler that's not as loud as the stock cooler.

 

Gigabyte makes a silent 4850, if you're interested in that. It obviously isn't going to perform as well as a 260, but I believe it's the highest-performance 'silent' card available.

Gigabyte 1GB 4850

 

Can someone please elaborate on how water-cooling works?

 

You'd actually have to have a watercooling setup already installed ... pump, radiators, etc. I posted an image of my gtx 260 waterblock+heatsink in a thread a few down called "gpuZ says my GTX 260 is core 216??" ... they cost about $60

 

Watercooling works by transfering the heat from waterblocks to a radiator (or more than 1). The radiators have massive surface area in proportion to it's overall size with a metal that conducts heat well such as copper. You use fans to blow air through the radiators. To connect the waterblocks to the radiator, you use tubing. To pump the water through the entire system, you use a pump. You use the waterblocks to cool things like your cpu, gpu, northbridge, etc. A loop can look like this:

Pump -> cpu waterblock -> northbridge waterblock -> radiator -> back to pump

When you buy a waterblock for your gpu, you add it into the loop with more tubing. So basically, you need to already have a pump, radiator, etc. You don't just get a watercooled graphics card by itself.

 

Actually u do, but not a GTX260.

http://www.zotac.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=231&Itemid=320

http://www.sapphireatomic.com/index.php?p=atomicseries