X-bit labs

ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer: Extremely Silent, Extremely Hot

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 10/19/2005 | 10:40 AM ]

NVIDIA’s GeForce 6600 GT is renowned for exceptional performance at affordable price-points. While this chip is one year old and seems like it is time for it to leave, the market is still looking forward the GeForce 6600 GT and considers it to be the best performance-mainstream solution. This is a reason why ASUS decided to introduce its new passive SilentCool cooler along with its GeForce 6600 GT-based graphics card, which is, by the way, one of a few GeForce 6600 GT products with 256MB of memory.

Table of contents:

• Package and Accessories
  
• Closer Look: PCB Design
  
• Closer Look: Cooling System
  
• Noise, Overclocking, 2D Quality
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Battlefield 2
  
• Chronicles of Riddick
  
• Doom III
  
• Far Cry
  
• F.E.A.R. Multiplayer Demo
  
• Pariah
  
• Half-Life 2
  
• Painkiller: Battle out of Hell
  
• Project: Snowblind
  
• Unreal Tournament 2004
  
• Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
  
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
  
• Performance in Simulators
  
• Colin McRae Rally 2005
  
• Pacific Fighters
  
• Lock On: Modern Air Combat
  
• Performance in Strategies
  
• Perimeter
  
• Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War
  
• Performance in Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Aquamark3
  
• Final Fantasy XI Official Benchmark 3
  
• Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 360
  
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120
  
• Conclusion
  

Nowadays personal computers and their main components consume rather huge amount of electricity, produce a lot of heat and cause a lot of noise with their coolers. This is a payback for unprecedented power at our fingertips: all the key components of modern personal computers are made using the leading edge technologies and are designed to deliver the absolute maximum they can.

Designers of microprocessors, graphics processors, hard disk drives and other products are struggling to make their devices fast and not requiring powerful cooling solutions. They do their best, but at the end of they day computers still produce a lot of annoying noises. What’s the solution? Passive cooling for everything and/or low-speed fans! But are they truly sufficient and cost effective?

At least, part of this question will be answered by today’s article about ASUSTeK’s Extreme N6600GT Silencer graphics card.