Gigabyte
Gigabyte has a lot of experience in the silent graphics market, and we have several ATI and NVIDIA cards from them for this review. An interesting statistic is that 90% of Gigabyte's shipped graphics solutions are silent, which makes a statement about the desirability of silent cards. Gigabyte is well represented in this review, having provided us with the highest number of solutions for testing. While their cards may not win any awards for good looks (the gold and turquoise coloring and unique heat sink designs aren't very easy on the eyes), they apparently handle silent operation very well, even at higher-than-stock clock speeds.
On the NVIDIA side, we have the Gigabyte 7600 GT, 7600 GS, 7300 GT, and 7300 GS. The Gigabyte 7600 GS comes shipped with its core overclocked to 450MHz, slightly higher (by 50MHz) than the stock version of this card. The Gigabyte 7300 GT also has a factory overclock of 450MHz core clock as opposed to the standard 350MHz core clock and an 800MHz memory clock verses the standard 667MHz memory clock on the 7300 GT. On the ATI side, we have the Gigabyte X1600 XT, X1600 Pro, X1300 Pro and X1300. All other Gigabyte cards aside from the 7600 GS and 7300 GT are clocked at reference speeds.
As we can see, the Gigabyte NVIDIA 7600 GT, ATI X1600 XT, and ATI X1600 Pro all have almost identical heat sink designs. The heat sinks are unique, with a bulky sink up front towards the DVI connections and heatpipes connecting to other heat sinks on the front and back of the card. The Gigabyte cards with this style heat sink are much more bulky than the other ones, and it's important to note that the silver heat sink uses up a second slot making these dual-slot solutions.
The Gigabyte X1300 Pro looks almost the same as the previous three Gigabyte cards; however, it is missing the extra heat sink on the back and the second metal pipe that would extend to it. The silver heat sink on the front still takes up an extra slot however, which is a point against this and the other three cards.
The Gigabyte 7600 GS and 7300 GT are very similar in appearance. The heat sinks on these cards are much more compact than those on the first four cards we mentioned. These cards don't take up an extra slot and only have a gold heat sink on the front, with a strange looking heatpipe running out and back in a "U" shape from the main heat sink. The heatpipe is attached to thin metal sheets, all in the name of increasing surface area and removing heat from the hotter portions of the card. These thin metal sheets seem a little delicate and might bend if the card is mishandled, though a slightly bent heat sink fin isn't really a major problem.
The Gigabyte 7300 GS and X1300 have heat sinks with a unique type of gold cover or hood running along the top part of the cards, over a silver heat sink on the cards' processor. The Gigabyte 7300 GS doesn't have a bridge connector on the top of the card for SLI operation, but it will still run in SLI (with a second card) without the bridge connection.
Gigabyte seems to have a definite plan about their custom heat sink designs, and after testing and overclocking these cards, there isn't much doubt that they perform well. They did, however, tend to get very hot to the touch after repeated testing, to the point where they became difficult to hold. We'll talk more about how well these cards overclocked in the "Overclocking" section.
Gigabyte has a lot of experience in the silent graphics market, and we have several ATI and NVIDIA cards from them for this review. An interesting statistic is that 90% of Gigabyte's shipped graphics solutions are silent, which makes a statement about the desirability of silent cards. Gigabyte is well represented in this review, having provided us with the highest number of solutions for testing. While their cards may not win any awards for good looks (the gold and turquoise coloring and unique heat sink designs aren't very easy on the eyes), they apparently handle silent operation very well, even at higher-than-stock clock speeds.
On the NVIDIA side, we have the Gigabyte 7600 GT, 7600 GS, 7300 GT, and 7300 GS. The Gigabyte 7600 GS comes shipped with its core overclocked to 450MHz, slightly higher (by 50MHz) than the stock version of this card. The Gigabyte 7300 GT also has a factory overclock of 450MHz core clock as opposed to the standard 350MHz core clock and an 800MHz memory clock verses the standard 667MHz memory clock on the 7300 GT. On the ATI side, we have the Gigabyte X1600 XT, X1600 Pro, X1300 Pro and X1300. All other Gigabyte cards aside from the 7600 GS and 7300 GT are clocked at reference speeds.
As we can see, the Gigabyte NVIDIA 7600 GT, ATI X1600 XT, and ATI X1600 Pro all have almost identical heat sink designs. The heat sinks are unique, with a bulky sink up front towards the DVI connections and heatpipes connecting to other heat sinks on the front and back of the card. The Gigabyte cards with this style heat sink are much more bulky than the other ones, and it's important to note that the silver heat sink uses up a second slot making these dual-slot solutions.
The Gigabyte X1300 Pro looks almost the same as the previous three Gigabyte cards; however, it is missing the extra heat sink on the back and the second metal pipe that would extend to it. The silver heat sink on the front still takes up an extra slot however, which is a point against this and the other three cards.
The Gigabyte 7600 GS and 7300 GT are very similar in appearance. The heat sinks on these cards are much more compact than those on the first four cards we mentioned. These cards don't take up an extra slot and only have a gold heat sink on the front, with a strange looking heatpipe running out and back in a "U" shape from the main heat sink. The heatpipe is attached to thin metal sheets, all in the name of increasing surface area and removing heat from the hotter portions of the card. These thin metal sheets seem a little delicate and might bend if the card is mishandled, though a slightly bent heat sink fin isn't really a major problem.
The Gigabyte 7300 GS and X1300 have heat sinks with a unique type of gold cover or hood running along the top part of the cards, over a silver heat sink on the cards' processor. The Gigabyte 7300 GS doesn't have a bridge connector on the top of the card for SLI operation, but it will still run in SLI (with a second card) without the bridge connection.
Gigabyte seems to have a definite plan about their custom heat sink designs, and after testing and overclocking these cards, there isn't much doubt that they perform well. They did, however, tend to get very hot to the touch after repeated testing, to the point where they became difficult to hold. We'll talk more about how well these cards overclocked in the "Overclocking" section.
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Josh Venning - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
I also forgot to mention that some people use their pcs in home theater systems as well. This would be another case when you want as little noise from your computer as possible.imaheadcase - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
That was not always the case, my 9700 Pro i still use when fan went out a year ago, works like a charm without it on. It was in its time the high end card, lets hope those days come buy again :Deckre - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
What a great review, when tom did their silent VC review, they included a grand total of three cards...pfft. nice job anand.I have the 7600GT, very sweet and 0dB is oh so nice.
Josh Venning - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
We just wanted to say thanks all for your comments and we are still trying to make sure we've caught any errors. (there are actually only 20 cards in the roundup and not 21) As Derek said, these cards were included in the article because we requested any and all silent cards that any of the manufacturers were willing to give us to review. That's also why we have more cards from ASUS and Gigabyte than the others.Olaf van der Spek - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
Because the videocard industry hasn't introduced such a bad design as the netburst architecture.
epsilonparadox - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
No they've introduced worse. When they recommend a second PS just for grafx or even a 1Kw single PS, they've taken intel's lack of thermal control to a whole new level.DerekWilson - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
graphics cards use much much less power in 2d mode than in 3d mode -- and even their 3d power saving capabilities are really good.this is especially true when you consider the ammount of processing power a GPU delivers compared to a CPU.
Theoretical peak performance of a current desktop CPU is in the 10-15 GFLOPS range at best. For a GPU, theoretical peak performance is at least one order of magnitude larger reaching up over 200 GFLOPS in high end cases.
I'm not saying we can reach these theoretical peak rates on either a CPU or a GPU, but a GPU is doing much much more work under load than a CPU possibly could.
Keep in mind we aren't even up to GHz on GPU cores. On the CPU front, Intel just shortened the pipeline and decreased clock speeds to save power -- doing more work in one cycle. This is absolutely what a GPU does.
And the icing on the cake is the sheer options on the silent GPU front. Neither AMD nor Intel make a fast desktop CPU that can be (easily) passively cooled. These parts are a testiment to the efficiency of the GPU.
On the flip side, ATI and NVIDIA push their high end parts way up in clock speed and power consumption trying as hard as possible to gain the performance crown.
There are plenty of reasons GPUs draw more power than a CPU under load, but a lack of thermal control or inefficient desing is not one of them. It's about die size, transistor count, and total ammount of work being done.
JarredWalton - Saturday, September 2, 2006 - link
I disagree with Derek, at least in some regards. The budget and midrange GPUs generally do a good job at throttling down power requirements in 2D mode. The high-end parts fail miserably in my experience. Sure, they consume a lot less power than they do in 3D mode, but all you have to do is look at the difference between using a Radeon Mobility X1400 and a GeForce Go 7800 in the Dell laptops to http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=276...">see the difference in battery life.In 2D mode, graphics chips still consume a ton of power relatively speaking -- probably a lot of that going to the memory as well. A lot of this can be blamed on transistor counts and die size, but I certainly think that NVIDIA and ATI could reduce power more. The problem right now is that power use is a secondary consideration, and ATI and NVIDIA both need to have a paradigm shift similar to what Intel had with the Pentium M. If they could put a lot of resources into designing a fast but much less power-hungry GPU, I'm sure they could cut power draw quite a bit in both idle and load situations.
That's really the crux of the problem though: resources. Neither company has anywhere near the resources that AMD has, let alone the resources that Intel has. Process technology is at least a year behind Intel if not more, chip layouts are mostly computer generated as opposed to being tweaked manually (I think), and none of the companies have really started at square one trying to create a power efficient design; that always seems to be tacked on after-the-fact.
GPUs definitely do a lot of work, although GFLOPS is a terrible measure performance. The highly parallel nature of 3D rendering does allow you to scale performance very easily, but power requirements also scale almost linearly with performance when using the same architecture. It would be nice to see some balance between performance scaling and power requirements... I am gravely concerned about what Windows Vista is going to do for battery life on laptops, at least if you enable the Aero Glass interface. Faster switching to low-power states (for both memory and GPU) ought to be high on the list for next-generation GPUs.
DaveLessnau - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
I'm wondering why Anandtech tested Asus' EN7800 GT card instead of their EN7600 GT. That card would be more in line with Gigabyte's 7600 GT version and, I believe, is more available than the 7800 version. In the near future, I'd like to buy one of these silent 7600GTs and was hoping this review would help. Oh, well.DerekWilson - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
you can get a really good idea of how it would perform by looking at Gigabyte's card.as I mentioned elsewhere in the comments, we requested all the silent cards manufacturers could provide. if we don't have it, it is likely because they were unable to get us the card in time for inclusion in this review.