Noiseless cooling done well.
If you've ever spent money on a graphics card, lovingly installed it into your rig and finally turned it on, odds are that you've probably been hit by a teensy little fan whirring along at 100 per cent speed. These little screamers are going out of style now, but the replacement beefy ones are just as bad - with power consumption of just the fan reaching almost an entire amp, they sound more like a leafblower than a cooling fan! There's a special breed of cards out there that aren't afflicted by this noise though; passively cooled cards. GIGABYTE sent us its latest design, mounted to a 9800GT, so we turned the heat up far as we could push it.
Based around the G92 core that we're familiar enough with we can tell you where each individual pin is without even looking, it's a 55nm-based chip with 112 stream processors running at the reference speed of 600MHz. An entire gigabyte of GDDR3 memory runs alongside the core at a speed of 900MHz, getting data through a 256-bit wide memory bus. There are many iterations of this core, but this is the most common. While it is PCIe 2.0 it still needs an external PCIe 6-pin power connector.
And funnily enough, here we hit a small problem - the power connector is placed in a very awkward position, right against the heatsink. It's easy enough to connect but unplugging a cable from the card was an exercise in finger-batics, meaning you'll have to be either a rubber-man or very patient to get it out safely. There's also an SLI nipple at the top of the card, but this is easy to access even if you're running it in SLI with another card. A DVI, VGA and HDMI port round up the video connections.
Physically this card is erring on the side of just a little huge, rivalling the length of full-size cards in heatsink alone. Cooling is essentially a very large copper base (about 8cm2); three thick heatpipes suck heat away from there and channel it along to the thin aluminium fins. There is a very large gap between every single fin, taking advantage of any airflow in the case to get rid of as much heat as possible. The expansion bracket has extruded fins poking through it (right next to the DVI port), and thermal convection suggests that cool air outside the case will be sucked in through there to cool the fins - though dust might become an issue. Like we've mentioned earlier this is a passive heatsink, so no fan is needed to keep things cool.
Things were kept very cool at stock, running at an idle temp of 49 degrees and a load of 69. There was no noise produced by the card at all, something that's very welcome. Surprisingly when we got to overclocking the card, our low expectations were met with a core that managed to reach 724MHz (plus twenty one per cent), and we could also squeeze out 1050MHz(another seventeen per cent) on the memory even though they weren't cooled by even a heatsink! This was under testbed conditions, so cooling performance may vary depending on your case and airflow setup.
You'll pay roughly an extra $60 over a generic 9800GT to get this Silent Cell version, and performance in games is predictably decent, giving a playable everything without too much worry. This card would be a great choice for those looking for a nice quiet gaming rig, or even a dual-purpose media centre - and you can even get some overclocking done on it too.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012