Sorry for the delay! I can barely hear the fan over the rest of my case fans when playing; idle: 47c, load 88c. However when increased manually past the 80% mark, the fan is really loud and you can definitely hear it. Note that the first reviews of the GTX 480 back in March used a different bios (the press bios, let's call it), my card has the production bios. I hope this came useful.