While 10,200 megabytes per second is still about 18 gigabits short of 100 gigabits, that's still really badass/cool.

At least one reviewer on newegg seems to agree with @tonalt:

Fan was incredibly loud, even at 50% speed (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815548004)

Of course, if this card offends you, just buy the Asus card instead... or the Dell, or the Aplicata, or the Highpoint.

The Aplicata appears to be entirely passively cooled from the product pictures - performance may suffer a bit, though: https://www.amazon.com/Aplicata-Quad-NVMe-PCIe-Adapter/dp/B01MTU75X4/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_sims?ie=UTF8

But before doing that, ask yourself which workloads you have that actually require that much i/o performance. Are you shooting 8k uncompressed raw at 30p? I think that's around 70 gigabits per second. For much less than that, this card is probably overkill. On the other hand, if you have a big content shop or some sort of enterprise/cloud workload that needs huge iops, these cards could be total game-changers (though for those sorts of workloads, a 4U case loaded with SATA drives is already a pretty good solution :) ).

Believe me, I know a lot about this.

That small fan is very bad idea. This is year 2018. It's been years when major motherboard manufacturers replaced small fans from chipsets with heatsinks. Including ASRock. I guess they just wanted to reduce the cost of the device by replacing proper heatsink with that doomsday noise generator. Capitalism.

It's common knowledge. The smaller the fan, the higher frequency sound and the more irritating. You can read sites like http://www.silentpcreview.com/ so you can study it.

One of the reasons to buy SSD is that it's silent. They were nuts when they thought putting miniature angle grinder was a good idea. Passive cooling FTW, or if it's not possible, 120mm low rpm quality fan then.

It's small.

Ruined with noisy fan.