X-bit labs

Silence of the Radeon HD 2600: Gigabyte GV-RX26T256H Graphics Card Review (page 4)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 11/19/2007 | 11:51 PM ]

Cooling System

Gigabyte has rejuvenated the Silent Pipe II architecture. We described a passive cooler with a similar name in our GV-NX76T256D-RH review, but the new reincarnation has nothing in common with the older one.

All of the Silent Pipe II components are placed on one side of the card and occupy one slot only. This is possible, among other things, due to the thinner tech process of the chip. Although the 65nm ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT chip consists of as many as 390 million transistors its peak power consumption is only 48.6W.

The main component of this system is a heatsink with thick diagonal ribs that also serve as the cooler’s foundation. The ribs are fastened right to the PCB with four spring-loaded screws and an X-shaped plastic plate. There is a copper plate on the cooler’s base. It contacts with the GPU die and drive the heat flow to the two heat pipes.

The pipes help to distribute the heat evenly in the heatsink. Take note that the heatsink goes out of the dimensions of the PCB. You should take this into consideration if you are going to install the Gigabyte GV-RX26T256H into your multimedia system.

Silent Pipe II does not cool the memory chips, probably due to the low heat dissipation of GDDR3 chips working at a frequency of 1440MHz. The cooler is based on the natural convection principle overall.

There are three small holes in the card’s mounting bracket. These are meant for letting in cool air from the outside. Perhaps these holes are not very efficient as the cooling elements of Silent Pipe II would become scorching hot during the short time our system took to boot up. On the other hand, the high temperature of the heatsink is indicative of an efficient transfer of heat from the GPU.

We don’t discuss the overclockability and noisiness of the graphics card due to obvious reasons.