All the cards I had were "aftermarket" cards with better coolers (7x dual fan GTX 1070s & Pentium G3258 running Gentoo). It wasn't silent but it really wasn't that noisy. After unvolting and underclocking the GPU core, and overclocking the memory, they ran at ~60C under constant load.

I gave three of them to family members and sold the other 4. I was absolutely upfront in my eBay listings of their history.