4890 Reference Cooler

[nheather]

Looking to buy a couple of 4890s but not sure which one to go for.

On the one hand, as cheap as possible but I've heard a few negaitive comments about the reference cooler.

The Powercolor is a great price

Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 4890 1024MB GDDR5 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - Retail

but just has a reference cooler which some have said is noisy and allows the card to get hot.

Is this a real issue?

Cheers,

Nigel

 

[nheather]

Thanks for the comments. You're right about the subjective thing - my PC is pretty noisy at the moment and it doesn't bother me. Just difficult to judge when people complain about a card being noisy what that actually means as you don't know what they are comparing it with.

One persons noisy 4890 might be quite compared with my 8800GTS.

I'm assuming that all cards with a reference cooler are pretty much identical in terms of performance, noise and temps - perhaps warranty is about the only differentiator - does that sound right?

Cheers,

Nigel