Because NVidia's reference cooler blows donkey dick. The engineers should
get off their asses and make a good design like ATI that isn't so ****ing
loud. Otherwise consumers who don't like their computers to violate noise
ordinances have to look at third party cooling systems that invalidate the
card's warranty just to get a card that runs at a decent noise level.

The NV Silencer line from Arctic Cooling is quite good, both in terms
of noise level and performance... but yeah, it shouldn't be necessary
in the first place.

It blows my mind how NVIDIA managed to screw up the NV30's "FlowFX" so
bad, when the Silencer is much the same design yet somehow is not
audible in other ZIP codes, unlike NVIDIA's offering. Big-name card
builders ought to use Silencers standard--I'd pay the extra few bucks
for one.