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HD3850 and HD3870 will finally be quiet
THE RADEON HD 3850 will come to market with a single-slot cooling setup, outputting only 31 dBA.
This is closer to silence than 8600GTS or 8800GT, boards with which this card will undoubtedly be compared.
Meet mr. 31 dBA... quiet as a mouse
Daamit poured scorn on Nvidia for its noisy GeForce FX 5800 only to release a series of relatively noisy cards itself, starting with the Radeon X850, continuing with X1800 and X1900, and coming to market with 2900XT - yet another fine noisy product.
For its part, Nvidia had the FX5950 (quieter than the hairdryer FX5800), the not-so-noisy 6800 Ultra, the relatively-quiet 7800 and 7900 series, and continued its quiet approach with the massive 8800GTX and Ultra boards.
Taking dual-slot configuration resulted in meeting with mr. 34
dBA
But now Daamit is to deliver its first ever sub-45dBA cards.
A Radeon HD 3870 will follow with a dual-slot cooling setup, heatpipes and everything. This setup will output 34 dBA, more than 3850, but drastically less than 2900XT or a direct competitor, GeForce 8800GT.
According to our data, 8800GT produces 43 dBA of ambient noise, and during our testing, Gainward, XFX and Zotac all had similarly tuned fans, quite loud ones - once that 3D load ramps up, that is. ยต
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The dual slot cooler on the 3870 looks like an Arctic Cooling solution.
Glad someone else than HIS finally noticed the efficiency of the AC stuff

Thumbs UP for this AMD!
I have a 2900XT 1GB and the card is not NOISY. ppl must be heavy drug users. b/c the only time the fan spins up is during game play. and even then is just barely loud, plus emerged in gameplay with explosions and stuff who has time to listen to a fan up close. give me a break ppl.
I put Zalman VGA coolers on my X800XTPE and X1950GT and they run almost silently. Last time I checked, they had nothing for the newer generation radeons, though. OEM coolers are almost always noisy.
please oh please tell me that the xt or 3870 will come with a single slot? or is the dream of 4 "xt" cards in crossfireX dead?
In response to above comment..
99% of ppl DO NOT CARE about 4x SLI or Crossfire, GET REAL!

And if these cards have performance like 8800GT or better I'll take them. And i'll take it the dual slot way cos let's face it.. With almost everything being onboard (LAN, sound, firewire, etc) I have more slots than I'll need. And once 1x 3870 or something won't be enough, I?ll be buying 5870 or something anyway. Just like it happened with my 6xxx nvidia card..
Even with a dual slot cooler the quad-Crossfire
will be possible, you just need the right board
for it ;)
Take a look at the layout of the new MSI K9A2 Platinum

It's just a shame that this will make the use
of a good pci soundcard somewhat difficult (perhaps it is possible with flexible risers, else you would have to stick with an USB-Soundcard), which is a real pitty for
the target group of harcore-gamers.
31dBA is by no means quiet. It's not as noisy as some of the coolers out there, but unless you're in a very busy office that is STILL too loud. Get it to around 20dBA and we'll talk.

Honestly, you people must have the worst hearing ever if you consider that quiet. You're almost getting to HardOCP's standard where they talk about 38dBA as if it's "silent".

Please reserve such words for products that deserve it.
Looks like the move to the new process worked well for the card. Now if noise has improved at higher than R600 clocks...these should be fun to clock on water.

Yeah...most gamers don't really care about noise when they play games. Some however do have quiet everything else (low-end crap)...which means the graphics will stand out a bit in 2D mode and really be noticed in 3D.

4 Slots will still be possible with the 3870...you'll just have to watercool them. There's a reason why many of the 790 boards only have 3 slots not to mention the amount of CPU processing power you'd need to actually use 4 of these bad boys to their full potential.
And I don't find it noisy at all. I also had a 6800 Ultra and it was a sight better than the 4400 TI I had before that.
In fact, since the Dustbuster, I do believe that every single card I have bought (that is, all 4 of them) have been quiet enough for me not to seek to put a watercooling solution on them like I had for the 4400 TI.
Finally we start to see a downward trend on dB and power consumption. It was seriously getting out of hand. Having a jet engine in the house blasting noise and heat was getting a bit much.

The 8800 series cards looked great on stats. But Come on the power consumption made me feel like I had a fleet of hummers in my drive way.

Ati's response at the time was well..... Stupid. We will take an OK card and crank it up and hope to hell it doesn't pop.

But lets get serious about this noise output. I have to say that 34dB is still far to much. Drop the power requirements and drop the noise. 

A gaming machine at home should not require it's own power drop from the city grid. 

Note I equate power and noise. If you consume lots of power you have to get rid of it. First of power is converted to heat. In order to not cause a melt down you have to push that heat away. That requires fans for the most part. The more power the more/bigger fans. fans are noisy. Thus
Power consumption == dB.

AMD/NVIDIA are you reading this. bring the power DOWN please.