What kind of noise was there? NONE! After all, there's no fan. This is a great change from the hair dryer that normally resides in the graphics slot on my computer. The "Silent-Pipe II Technology" actually kept GPU temperatures well out of the danger zone. I was expecting temperatures in the 80 Celsius range, but after some gaming and benchmarking (3DMark06 looped 4 times) the on-board temperature sensor gave a reading of 58 Celsius via Riva Tuner; something I was not expecting.