I know, I know, it's not strictly a silence-related thread, but I'm hoping that one or two of you will spare a minute to make a suggestion that'll save me a lot of hours of reading elsewhere.

I'm wanting to choose a decent card but it needn't be too special or expensive: it's not for gaming.
Needs to be happy at 1600x1200.
(I'm watching prices and reviews of 1600x1200 LCD monitors at present...)
Must be well supported by XFree86. (Ideally I'd prefer to avoid NVidia with their closed-source binary-only drivers.)
Obviously, fanless is good, but I'm willing to modify a fanned card if necessary, with water-cooling or one of those Zalman heatsinks.

Recommendations, anyone?

the 9600 will support 1600x1200

I'm not sure if the 9200 will.

I think, although I may be wrong, that Geforce 2 MX supports 1600x1200, is fanless and is supproted by XFree86 4.3.

My 9100 does, so I assume the 9000 and 9200 will too. I think you can get fanless 9000s.

The open-source drivers will work just fine if you don't care about 3D.

If it's not for gaming, then don't forget Matrox

For example, the Matrox Millenium P650 (with spec) has no fan and 2 independant DVI output and linux drivers (they even make their powerdesk util for linux).

I am now at work with a 20" 1600x1200 LCD hooked on this one and it's really nice (a philips 200P3, if you are interested).

Oh and as a bonus it come with an huge heastink without any fan

Thankyou for the ideas.
According to the ATI site, their 7500 supports DVI-out up to 1600x1200 but I've not seen a fanless one so far. The XFree-86 site says it supports those cards fully, including the dual-display capability (though only one of that card's outputs is DVI). If I can find a fanless one then it'd probably do. I don't think there's much point for me in paying several times as much for a 9x00.

The Matrox P650 seems like overkill, but a G550 might be an idea.

A Philips 200P3, you say? That's worth knowing. Now I've found the 200P3G on their site, but it doesn't state brightness, contrast, response time or viewing angle. The lowest price www.pcindex.co.uk knows for it is £945 inc. tax. That puts it among the less dizzyingly expensive of the 1600x1200 LCDs.

Good point about the 2-D NVidia support, blahblahbloo.

Tigr, it looks as though the Geforce2 MX is rather hard to find with DVI, if it exists at all.

or maybe a radeon 9200 (most are fanless) ?

I had problem with the DVI output of my G550 to this screen and cannot configured it to go 1600x1200 on DVI output, so I switched for a P650 ... but that's @work, so I didn't payed anything

for the specs, they are here : brightness 250 cd/m2 (too much for me), contrast 300:1, response time 30 ms, wonderful viewing angle (i think more than the spec at 160°/160°).

Thankyou. A 9200 looks good except I'm not sure about the Xfree86 support. It's not listed here:
www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/radeon.4.html
but there's mention of it in the development changelogs so maybe the latest snapshot of the driver would work. Failing that, I've seen some mention of configuring Xfree86 to think it's (some code number corresponding to) a 9000, which uses the RV250 chipset rather than the RV280...