I thought the recent customer-orientated ATI high range cards were quite noisy as well?
I'd never buy ATI because of their lack of attention to drivers on all their offerings. From my experience you have to hope that they're paying particular attention to your card. From reinstalling a friend's PC recently with an old ATI chipset in, my past experiences are confirmed once again.
I think it's a bad time to buy high range anything regarding x86 hardware.
I'm currently using a GeForce 4 Ti4200, pretty quiet.