Asus preps 'silent' Radeon 1600XT card

Monster heatsink ahoy!

By Tony Smith • Get more from this author

Posted in Peripherals, 3rd November 2005 01:02 GMT

Asus will this month ship what it claims is an ATI Radeon X1600-based graphics card that offers near-silent operation.

The EAX1600XT SILENT/TVD/256M board will ship with a large heatsink mounted on the back of the board. It's connected to the GPU by a pair of copper heatpipes. Asus claims the rig is capable of pulling all the heat it needs to away from the graphics chip, while the host PC's CPU fan is sufficient to suck it away from the heatsink.

The upshot: "The graphics card is fan-less and operates at 0dB for quiet computing," says Asus.

The GPU is clocked at 590MHz, with the 256MB of GDDR 3 SDRAM on board running at 690MHz (1.38GHz effective). The board has DVI, VGA and TV output.

Asus said the EAX1600XT SILENT/TVD/256M will ship in the UK by the end of November. So too will the lower-end, fan-equipped EAX1600Pro TD/256M. It too is based on ATI's Radeon 1600 family, though the Pro part is clocked at 500MHz, while the 256MB of DDR 2 SDRAM is clocked to 390MHz (780MHz effective). The board has DVI, VGA and TV output.

Both boards will ship with Asus' GameReplay software, which renders on-screen 3D action into an MPEG 4 video file. The code can also stream the video onto the Net. ®

Asus EAX1600XT