Gigabyte's Silent-Pipe II Cooling cards are designed to run silently - and they manage to hold their own against anything out there performance-wise. Harnessing their power and silence, though, requires a study in air-flow adjustments in your case.

Good review. I was surprised by how much cooler the passive card was over the active card. I would get one definately.

Just the review I was waiting for, thanks

Wow, I am impressed! I have been waiting for a silent card with decent power to come out. I originally looked at the silent 6600GT but I was hearing too many problems of overheating, plus the fact that it just wasn't that powerful of a card. I really like how this review tested the card in several different cases, as it gives me an idea of what to expect if I were to "upgrade" to this card for the silence factor.

Plus, this card is only $150??? That's awesome!

The only additional testing I'd like to see done with this card is testing in SLI...I wonder what temperatures and performance would be like. If I could upgrade from a noisy 6800 Ultra to two silent 7600GT's without much of a performance loss then I'd be really happy. Now that I think about it I don't even know how a single 7600GT stacks against a 6800 Ultra...off to the video card charts I go! (I hope they are both on there...)

Good Review...

Would be nice to see how the card performs with the "improved" air flow of a BTX case. Can we make an update?

Any why is this thread in HW > Memory instead of graphics?

I don't quite understand why this cooling device would work. The card is pulling in hot air, not cold air, from the back of the case. Once the air from the main case fans exits the case, the air just kinda sits there, especially with the mess of cables that people have at the back of their case. The passive solution here would pull this hot air back into the case, wouldnt it? Sure, the hot air would have a chance to mix slightly with cold air behind the case, but in the long run for extended gaming sessions I could see this as a potential problem.

Better just to spend the money for either a zalman cooler or liquid cooling, if you really want that silence. Personally, I'm either wearing headphones or I have the speakers going at a nice volume, so I never notice the case fans or any other noise anyways.

Its kinda a tri slot solution you cant use the pci slot above the card you cant use the pci slot below the card. Put two of these into a comp and you probably wont have much space to put in anything else (audigy, wireless, TV tuner etc etc).

I set this card up on a P5WD2 Deluxe on the second PCIe lane the one far away from the NB. Because the heat radiating from the card was quite hot and too close to the NB. If I set this card up on the first PCIe slot near the NB I noticed the NBs temp would rise 5-6 deg C.

There are small silver metal fins that stick out near where you plug in your LCD on the back of the card. These fins bend reall easy (can be bent back into shape reall easy too) and can be a tight squeeze when you install your card you will find out for yourself (I used a Lian Li PC 60 Plus). But I must admit that its a good idea to put some of those hot fins on the outside of your case for better cooling.

The extra 120mm squirril that is mounted above the PCI slots wouldnt fit because of the heat pipe get in the way (just incase you plan to install this card into a Lian Li PC 60.

Overall if you MUST have a silent PC its not bad. There shouldnt be that much hype about this card tho considering ASUS did this to a 6600GT a few years back.

But keep in mind that you should have some decent air flow in your case to remove the heat generated from the GPU. That means case fans that means noize that means it is no longer slilent.

I wonder if two of these 7600GTsin SLI would beat a single 7900GT?? It would have been nice to see the SLI results of 2x 7600GTs... a quiet yet powerful system would be a drem come true for some HTPC makers. The SLI info would have been more useful to us than the info of how it rates in differnt pc cases.

The other thing I "like" about the card is that it does not need extra power from the PSU unlike the 7900GTs. This means you can get away with using a lower end PSU say 400 wat or so.

Pity the review used a "Nvidia reference board" because Gigabyte also made a 7600 GT with a fan, it would be nice to compare apples to apples, gigabyte to gigabyte.

When i purchased the card the one with heat pipes II is the same price as the normal one with a fan (the one with the fan was out of stock at the time)..... personally I can live with the noize which isnt alot and would prefer to use the PCI slots above and below the PCIe.

Low power usage in processors is in vogue right now. You mention that no extra power connector is needed for the card, so the passively cooled card ought to use less. How about a comparison of how many watts this card uses compared to the reference card?

You mention a certain point there with pulling in air that's coming out the back of the case and the airflow cable interference.

Of course, a lot depends on where your case is sitting and what you have behind it.

Also, there is the issue of inverted installations when the gpu sits above the cpu - the diagram does not address this.

One other thing to remember, hot air will always rise, so the heat going out the back will go out and up. Generally, there is always a difference in temperature between the ambient air and the inside of your case, so any air coming in should be cooler.

I am impressed by the performance too. It would be nice to have seen sli numbers.

The design is very nice and seems to work well. This would work nice in a Home Theatre System.

Correct. I was thinking the exact same thing. Low noise, low heat, HD output, good performance, good price.

And if one isn't enough, you can still install a second.

HTPC boxes being horizontal would allow ideal cooling as well, as long as you don't place your HTPC in a cabinet with a sealed rear, or with other hot AV equipment.

hot air that exits the case goes up, what you said would make sense if you keep your tower upside down

I`ts very nice cooling solution. My opinion is that graphic card manufacturers must start to make cards cooler with better performances.
Make the better chip but with lower power consumption and with better designed shaders. Put more memory on card but with lower cl-s.

I had experiment with pasive cooling with FX5700. I put a metal plate over the GPU with thin layer of gold and a ordinary heatsink from audio amplifier (10cmx5.5cm) idle temp - 28C, fill load 42C.

Just a little... and you get a good cooling sistem.

Sorry guys, there were a couple reasons I didn't take SLI benches. Primarily this review isn't about 7600 GT performance which is already well documented, but an analysis of the unique cooling system.

For the record, two 7600 GTs in SLI aren't as quick as a 7900 GT in all of the benches I've seen.

For sure, and I found it to be very interesting.

I've been playing with thermocouples, fans and the like on and around GPUs lately. I put a $3 slot cooler above an X1800XT with the fan opening flipped so it was right over the back side of the 1800. It was surprising just how much heat the slot fan pulled off the back of the card - and I fully expected it to be quite a bit.

This makes perfect sense, really, because of the physics of sound and just how much acoustical energy has to be removed from an item like a loud PC case to lower the SPL by a few dB. I would have liked to have seen the numbers. I've done noise abatement work and do understand how these data are not always clear-cut nor super impressive. When one is removing or reducing the noise source(s) to accomplish quieting, then nearly every major source must be reduced greatly or removed in order to get a loud item really quieted. Many people that work in a place they consider moderatley noisy do not consider the problem solved till the ambient SPL is reduced by at least 8 or 10 dB - which is a huge level of reduction!

Conversely, with the Aurora case, which was already reasonably quiet, the GPU probably represented a large proportion of the acoustical energy of the system, so when it was eliminated, the difference was easy to hear.

Excellent review! I hope PC component designers continue aggressively down this path.