Early 90s graphics card helped me reduce noise on my headless server

At home, I have this Debian Wheezy headless server - a Dell, not sure about the model. It has a P4 @ 3.0GHZ, 1GB ram, and I threw in 2 working hard drives in there. One of them is system/storage, the other one takes rsync backups.

It also had a Nvidia Geforce 4xx card, with passive cooling. I sold that to a guy who needed that card, and he gave me a semi-working AMD card from the same era. The picture wobbles on that one at higher resolutions, and the cooler is kind of noisy.

Lately, the noise started to get to me, and I decided to dive into my boxes of leftover hardware. I managed to find a S3 Trio 64v+ similar to the one pictured below, and I threw it in, to see if it would work. 

I plugged my monitor in, booted the system with only that graphics card, and the kernel started to boot, but as soon as modules started loading, i lost my picture. Figured it probably has something to do with an old module loading or something similar.

Lucky for me, the system was actually running, and I could SSH in and investigate. The only video related module that was loaded was i915, but i'm pretty sure i need a module that is called s3<something>. I wanted to try and blacklist the i915 module, so I opened up my /etc/modprobe.d/fbdev-blacklist.conf . To my surprise, the s3fb was commented. I uncommented that guy, rebooted, and everything worked :)

No wobbly picture 
No noise

Great success

Edit:

As it turns out, this home server can run pure headless without a graphics card! Good people of Reddit, specifically /u/ghost_upstairs, insisted that it was possible, while I was almost certain that this cannot be done on common PC hardware. I'm glad I was wrong!