It looks like Inno3D made the right choice teaming up with Arctic Cooling for their cooling solution. The Inno3D iChill GTX 260 is one of the quietest ways to have a high-end card today. Personally I would not have dreamed of a GTX 260 card design that could be so quiet. But the card is not only quiet, it is also fast. Inno3D has chosen to overclock the card out of the box with full warranty. This brings the card to within 5% of the GTX 280 performance, with some additional overclocking you can easily match the GTX 280. On our sample we saw some very nice additional overclocking potential of over 20% for both the core and the memory. Unfortunately the memory chips on both sides are not cooled, which will probably limit your memory overclock a bit.
The only problem that I can foresee is that the high price will turn away a lot of potential buyers. A normal GTX 260 216 SP reference card will cost about $220 online, which is $80 less than what Inno3D is asking for their card. The GTX 280 is about $15 more than the price tag of Inno3D's iChill GTX 260. If the product would be positioned closer to $250, which is about the price increase when buying a retail Arctic Cooling Accelero XXX cooler, it would certainly sell in much larger volumes. However, if I were in the market for a GTX 280 today I would prefer the Inno3D iChill GTX 260 over the GTX 280 any time. The reduced fan noise will make it such a more pleasant experience, while I doubt anyone will notice a 5% performance difference in games.