Asus has taken the concept of passively-cooled graphics cards seriously for a number of years and offers a good range of such cards based around both ATI and Nvidia GPUs. Each new generation of passive cards offers more performance and features than the last, and the latest generation of GPUs to get the silent treatment is Nvidia's 8600, with both the GT and GTS flavours now equipped with passive coolers.

Nvidia's Geforce 8600 is aimed at the mainstream market, bringing DirectX 10 support into the price range that most people can afford, and instead of the normal practice of just shredding features of a core until it fits the price point, Nvidia has given some serious thought to the G84 (the code name of the 8600). While it lacks many of the features and the performance of the mighty G80, it does have some unique features of it own.

For a start the die process for the G84 has shrunk, from the G80's 90nm down to 80nm, but it still has an impressive 289 million transistors on board. The number of unified shaders has been reduced from the 128 of the 8800GTX down to a measly 32, but in the process Nvidia has given these a bit of a tweak to improve performance, so they run at 1.45GHz. As standard the core clock of the 8600GTS speeds along at 675MHz and, although the memory is clocked at 1GHz (2GHz effective) GDDR3, it's strangled by only having a 128-bit interface.

However the 8600GTS does have one advantage over its bigger, badder siblings, and it's one of the reasons why you might want to buy a card based on it - Video Processor 2. This is Nvidia's second generation PureVideo engine (the G80s use the first generation first seen on the GeForce 7 series).

The new engine allows for greatly reduced CPU usage during video decoding acceleration and post processing work. With the H.264 and VC-1 video codecs (used in Blu-Ray and HD DVD), along with HDCP support, it means that you should be able to watch High Definition movies without too many problems, something you can't so easily do with a G80 card.

Asus's EN8600GTS Silent is built on a non-reference blue PCB, using the standard clock speeds, over which looms the large aluminium passive heat-sink, covering the whole board save a small area on the edge where a couple of capacitors and the 6-pin power socket sit. A single heat-pipe runs from the base of this heat-sink and up into a second aluminium heat-sink to provide even more cooling. This second heat-sink can be swivelled around to make use of the cooling effect of the CPU fan.

The expansion plate holds an S-Video output along with two dual-link DVI outputs supporting resolutions up to a stonking 3,840 by 2,400.

In terms of gaming performance, the EN8600GTS Silent offers decent frame rates at lower resolutions - 102fps average in F.E.A.R and 128fps in Far Cry at 1,024 by 768 pixels - but as soon as the resolution and anti-aliasing are stepped up, the performance starts to trail away pretty rapidly; 36fps average in F.E.A.R, 64fps in Far Cry at 1,280 by 1,024 pixels with 4x anti-aliasing and 4x aniscopic filtering. Even so, it's not exactly slow.

Verdict
This is an ideal card if you are building a silent PC where movie playback is important and gaming performance isn't the absolute priority, but its true home is in an HTPC, although not if you are using a slimline case.

Company: Asus

Contact: 0870 120 8340

Tags: nvidia graphics processing unit geforce 8 series geforce 7 series directx geforce hardware components