With moves underway to make PCs more like white goods than beige boxes, the need for the internals of a PC to run as silently as possible has never been greater. One of the major causes of sudden, high-pitched screaming noises coming from your PC is the graphics card's cooling fan, so let's get rid of it.

In the not too distant past this meant sacrificing any idea of high-speed games play and relying on slow, low powered cards that didn't get too hot. Today, things have changed dramatically, with many manufacturers offering either water-cooled or custom fan-cooled, high-end cards, as well as passively-cooled mid- and value-range cards.

One of the latest of the latter type is from Asus, the EAX1600XT Silent, which joins a growing number of silent cards produced by Asus on both ATI and Nvidia platforms. Given the name, it comes as no surprise that the EAX1600XT Silent is built around ATI's Radeon X1600XT unit, a mid-range card which offers reasonably good performance for a good price: ATI's 'best bang for your buck' model.

Straightway the EAX1600XT Silent looks different from most cards, as there's very little in the way of cooling hardware on the front of the card; just a plate on top of the GPU with two heat pipes coming out of it. Follow these pipes around to the back of the card and you'll be confronted by a large heatsink that draws away the heat.

Under the plate on the front of the card sits a reference-clocked Radeon X1600XT, or, to give it its code name, the R530. The core is built on a 90nm fabrication process with just 157 million transistors and has 12 pixel pipelines, 8 vertex pipelines and a 128-bit memory interface. The core is clocked at a standard 590MHz while the 256MB of DDR3 memory is also clocked at reference speeds; 690MHz (1.38GHz effective).

The Radeon X1600 is also ATIs first core in the mainstream segment to offer Shader Model 3.0 support, something that the next generation of games will make full use of. That the card only has a single DVI connector will disappoint some people, as many of the latest cards have two DVI ports, but at least you do get a DVI-to-VGA adapter for the VGA port. Joining these two on the backplane is an S-Video port.

In performance terms, the EAX1600XT Silent does a pretty good job. 3DMark05 scores 5,475 at a resolution of 1024 x 768, while in the real world tests, Half Life 2 and FarCry give 65fps and 51fps (frames per second) respectively. Remember, this is with no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering turned on, but all detail settings at maximum. Dropping these down or turning them off will, of course, return faster frame rates.

This is a useful card for those people interested in building as quiet a PC as possible, offering fairly good games performance too.