Passive cooling preferred (noise = deprecated). There will be plenty of other hardware contributing to that account.
3D performance not really an issue.
My experience is, that even the twin fans on either side of my MSI branded FX5960 are more than drowned out by the main cooling fans in the rest of the box. I know this card is way outside your stated budget, but I'm just saying: even the best-cooled cards are really not what you'd call 'noisy'. Your harddrive would probably make a greater din starting up.
The drivers are generally excellent, and will outperform all your needs, as you describe them - which would be met by one of their 64MB GeForce cards (adequate for displaying Celestia with moderately detailed planetscapes, for instance). Although these are all passive-cooled, most of them are also PCI, so make sure you have a spare slot. Take it easy, Dan