I am looking for a silent video card for around $200 - 250 and am having a hard time deciding. I looked at some of the topics on here and it seems that people in Europe have the option of getting a Gainward Phantom, but I live in the US so that is not possible for me. Does anyone have any recommendations?

What do you need the video card for? Intermediate gaming? HTPC? Plan on overclocking? Once you let us know what you're looking to do with the new video card, we'll be able to provide better recommendations.

With that said, I'll go ahead and throw out that AMD Radeon cards tend to run quieter and cooler while drawing less power than NVidia cards. There are also a few brands known to be quieter and cooler...Sapphire and MSI come to mind, but I'm sure ASUS and Gigabyte fit the profile as well. I've "heard" that HIS cards tend to be rather loud.

Welcome to SPCR! If you plan to game, then also list the games and your monitor resolution.

Thanks for the replys.

I plan to game on 1920x1200 the games I am planning to play with it are Counter Strike GO and Tribes Ascend.

Right now I am thinking I should wait for the fanless 7770 or maybe even the fanless GTX 680 although I have no idea how long of a wait that would be. Sound is important to me because I would like to be able to sleep with the computer on.

Counter Strike GO uses the Source engine. So, the performance will be similar to Portal 2 and not very demanding unless you completely max out the GPU's quality settings @ 1920x1080. Anand Bench shows some Portal 2 benchmarks.

The HD 7770 is a good fit. The HD 7850 gives some headroom. Nvidia hasn't released their GTX 6xx mid-range cards, yet. The GTX 560 Ti is the best fit from Nvidia.

Tribes Ascend is a bit more demanding. Techspot has benchmarked the game at very high quality settings. Here, you'd have to dial down your resolution and quality levels for the 7750. The 7850 would allow native resolution and very high quality levels. On the Nvidia side, it's the GTX 560 Ti again.

So, it's more than $200 if you don't want to dial down quality and/or resolution settings.

Specific cards...
7770: Sapphire has shown off their passive 7770 Ultimate, but it's not available, yet. Their Vapor-X version is pretty quiet. ($150)
7850: The MSI R7850 Twin Frozr III and R7850 PE Twin Frozr IV have gotten good reviews and feedback. (~$260-280)
GTX 560 Ti: I haven't been tracking these...upside is they are in the $200-220 range, downside is they burn 50W more power than the 7850 while gaming. That heat has to be dissipated. So, similar cooling solutions will be louder for it than the 7850.

Hope that helps.

I think CA_Steve is plagiarizing my thoughts :). Also, I'd like to reiterate what CA_Steve said about the cooling on the cards. I've dealt with the 550 TI and 7850 cards and must say that Nvidia's cooling / sound is behind that of AMD's. In the end, it depends on what you want from the card...just gaming? Good cooling? etc.

FYI, EVGA is offering $30 rebates right on their 560 TI cards.

The price on 560's is pretty sweet right now. I'm thinking about going this route, but should I expect higher heat/noise at idle with nvidia as well as while gaming? Since I wear a pair on senheisser headphones at my desk, I'm not too worried about noise while gaming.

The 560 Ti idles ~ 15W, the 7850 ~ 10W. Shouldn't hear a difference with the same cooling solution. One caveat, if you use 2 monitors, the 560 Ti will use a lot more power.

Also, the 660 Ti is rumored to be released around Aug 16th. So, there should be price adjustments on the 7850 at that time. So, that might stir the pot for you.

Won't the AMD one consume more power in that case too?

The 7850 will use more power in 2 monitor mode than single, but not as painfully as the 5xx series. AMD doesn't idle the memclock if you have 2 monitors. Nvidia doesn't idle the memclock or the GPU clock. So, you end up with:

7850 single monitor idle: ~10W, 2 monitor idle: ~26W
560Ti single idle: ~15W; 2 monitor idle: ~59W

The good news is the GTX 6xx series does much better. The GTX 570 idles at ~13-15W both in single and 2 monitor modes. I'm hoping the 650 and 660 follow suit.