A Fanless Graphics Card from ASUS

mikemuch writes "ASUS has come out with the Extreme N6600GT Silencer/HTD, a GeForce 6600GT without any cooling fan. It's sort of odd looking, with heat sinks that fold on a hinge. Great for home theater since it's silent. Loyd Case of ExtremeTech has put it through a rigorous bunch of benchmarks."

Comments

Fanless

[mysqlrocks]

A Fanless Graphics Card

Did anybody else read this as a graphics card that nobody likes?

Re:Fanless

[Tatarize]

Did anybody else read this as a graphics card that nobody likes?

YES! You noticed it was from ASUS too?

Re:Fanless

[$RANDOMLUSER]

If you were talking about their motherboards, I'd agree; but I've found that their graphics cards tend to be pretty standard Nvidia reference cards. I tend to buy last years "top-of-the-line" cards, and I've owned a few of theirs without any problems.

Re:Fanless

[AKAImBatman]

What's so bad about ASUS boards? I've usually found them to be pretty reliable, and currently recommend the A8N-[E/SLI] boards to people. Is there something wrong I should know about?

Then again, I usually wait for the early adopters to help companies work out the bugs before making a purchase. I've heard from several people that the ASUS boards can be buggy, but they always seem to be fine by the time I get to them.

Re:Fanless

[PhotoBoy]

Seconded, I've had motherboards from Gigabyte, Abit, Shuttle and Epox (and Asus of course) and I've always found the Asus boards to be excellent, both stable and with lots of excellent features.

Compared to the piece of shit Shuttle SN25P I recently had that kept destroying my RAID array I would certainly be interested to hear what the grandparent doesn't like about Asus motherboards.

Re:Fanless

[theantipop]

There are some issues if you are trying to build a top-of-the-line system with the Asus boards. I own an A8N-E and with fast timed Corsair ram the board won't play nice. I would put the problem on Corsair (since they used to lie about their timings) but others have reported problems with other brands as well. I don't mean to say they make horrible products, I have been pretty happy with mine, but they have lost their outstanding reputation among enthusiasts which they had held for a long time.

Re:Fanless

[WraithRealm]

I myself will never again recommend ASUS boards to any of my customers. Not only are they prone to small failures like being unable to read the CPU fan speed to crashing onboard components, but with the exception of one board (which I later found out *had* broken - it just wasn't important enough to count) almost every ASUS board I've used in both my machines and a co-worker's machines have intermitent "connection" problem with the Southbridge. I don't know how many times I got called out to figure out what was wrong with a Network or Audio card, and it turns out to be a faulty PCI bus. Thank you ASUS, you won't be gettin' any of my business ever again.

And this video card with no fan, relying on *heatsinks* where other manufacturers recommend *water cooling* ... Watch the failure rates on these puppies. No thank you!

Re:Fanless

[hattig]

I found an old ASUS A7V (VIA KT133) the other day ... resurrected it ... still works fine, and it has no bulging capacitors. Must be 4 years old now. It was one of the boards with the onboard ATA RAID controller by Promise, so I'm gonna turn it into a home fileserver with some spare hard drives I've accumulated and stick it somewhere out of the way. It ran that 750MHz Duron at 825MHz for a good few years I remember.

Re:Fanless

[NeoSkandranon]

Contrasting story ahead:

Man, I *HATED* Asus for that mobo. Mine had no end of problems, most related to the four in one drivers and Soundblasters doing whacky things, which required playing with PCI timing or something in BIOS to fix, and a video card issue that never ceased. Later in life, it would mysteriously not find drives on the Promise ATA100 controller.

I honestly think most of the problem was the via chipset; IF i was going to avoid one aspect of the board for ever and ever, it would be via's chipsets rather than the Asus brand

Re:Fanless

[EmperorKagato]

In my experience i've seen 3 Gigabyte boards die(Mostly due to either North or South Bridge problems). However, all of my ASUS Boards survied and were gladly bought on ebay.

Re:Fanless

[wfberg]

Yes, it was the VIA chipset. Trip to memory lane, now you mentions "4-in-1 drivers". They managed to get one of the versions right at least, so it did work in the end. Only the soundblaster would work intermittently, but I blame that on the SB itself. I now have an MSI board with a via chipset, but I'm still not touching soundblaster, ever again.

Re:Fanless

[hattig]

I ran Linux on mine, so I never encountered the Windows issues wi... no, wait, I did install Windows 2000 on it, it ran for a day and never booted again. But it was fine with Linux.

But yes, simply from their reputation I'd never buy a VIA based system these days, although I do admit to having a 3 year old mini-itx system (EPIA 800 - the only computer system I've bought that hasn't lost much value over 3 years! Looking at the prices, do VIA really expect people to pay £150 for a fricking 1.3GHz CPU and motherboard (SP13000)?)

Re:Fanless

[arkanes]

And a me too from me. I had the same board, no end of trouble, most of which were related to the shitty 4-1 drivers. Never getting another VIA chipset, but I've had other Asus boards that were fine.

Re:Fanless

[Some_Llama]

Personally i stay away from ANY VIA chipsets, nothing but troubles, and the annoying ones where it works mostly but you get weird random lockups or crashes.. i have found the Nforce chipsets to be quite stable tho (especially after the second revision of drivers for new chipsets), currently have 3 systems with nforce2 chipsets but from different MB manufacturers and 1 NF3 chipset without a single problem, fast and reliable...

Re:Fanless

[ErikZ]

How do you diagnose a faulty PCI bus? I've been having problems with my ASUS board...

Re:Fanless

[toddestan]

I had a few lemons with some VIA based Socket A boards. However, I feel that's more of a VIA problem than a ASUS problem (try to find a KT333 board from any manufacturer that is solid, especially with multiple PCI cards and/or multiple sticks of memory). I still buy ASUS, but I'm done building Socket A systems.

Re:Fanless

[Anonymous Coward]

I got given one of those by my bother-in-law recently and whilst investigating whether it would be suitable for use as a linux based PVR/media centre, tried a PCI GeForce 4 MX420 in it and it refused to boot, I also had a AGP version available and that wouldn't work either. I was a liitle hesitant about flashing the BIOS as apparently it's a bit iffy (i.e. it works most of the time, but sometimes doesn't work) so I managed a workaround of booting with another graphics card as primary display and the GeForce4 as a secondary. So I'm not too impressed with this mobo. The boot times under linux (haven't tried Windows on it) seem a bit too long as well, but that's something I can live with and will look into later.

Re:Fanless

[Plaid Phantom]

Well, check the brand name, according to the GP. ;)

Re:Fanless

[Tycho]

Yes, the statement is correct, nobody likes the 6600GT. It has a poor reference card heatsink and heatsink attachment design, the heatsink likes to break its seal with the die on the GPU making the card overheat and lockup. The memory bandwidth is insufficient, the 6600GT has a 128-bit memory bus and a 1000MHZ memory clock. Consequently, there is not enough memory bandwidth to turn on antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. Since the 6600GT only has 8 pipelines and due to its insufficent memory bandwith, some features that the 6600GT has, like High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting and DirectX Shader model 3.0, are in a practical sense unsusable in any game. Not that DirectX 9 Pixel Shader 3.0 brings much to the table, the only feature added is dynamic branching over Pixel Shader 2.0 and dynamic branching is so GPU intensive that it is unsuable even on a 7800GTX. I also forget to mention the wretched Vertex Shader performance of the 6600GT even when only Vertex Shader 2.0 is used. The 6800GT is basically a bad card, stay away from every 6600GT.

Re:Fanless

[tom17]

I have had one of these for about 4 years now as well. It has been powered up almost every day since then without any problems. I have run it with Durons, Athlons (My version of upgrading), rebuilt it many times, both physically and software (more upgrading). Have run W2K and XP on it with no issues and for the last 2 years it has been sitting under my desk as a headless Linux server. Other than its now dated technology, which is not its fault, I cannot fault this board. I also have some friends with similar experiences of this board. I think the people with probs with this board must be doing something wrong or being unlucky.

8 out of 10

[geomon]

I guess the utility of this card is based on how demanding your game is. Looks like it gets "hammered" quite a bit by the GeForce card.

Silence can be expensive.

Re:8 out of 10

[Stuart Gibson]

I run a fanless Gigabyte X800XL that has no issue with the current games. Sure it isn't 1600x1200 with maximum AA and AF, but an easy 1280x1024 with sensible AA and AF (and eye candy on full) with the current benchmark games (HL2, Far Cry etc).

Doesn't seem like this is something that new, I've had my card for a few months now.

Stuart

Re:8 out of 10

[KiloByte]

You see, only one of computers I own and/or manage has a fan on its graphics card, and it's currently sitting headless in a closet. In fact, playing new mindless games is the only thing you need a powerful graphics card for.

I enjoy NetHack, MUDs, and if I feel like playing a graphical game, it's something which is playable. Master of Orion 2 is my favourite; it's still better than anything produced in recent years.

Re:8 out of 10

[snuf23]

"playing new mindless games"

Well, that's rather a subjective comment isn't it?
Instead of NetHack you could play Fate - which is much like a pretty graphical version of NetHack. For strategy there are plenty of upcoming games (i.e. Age of Empires 3, Civ 4, Rise of Legends) using snazzy 3D effects.
I used to play MUDs - now I play MMOs. Both I think have their merits.
You may want to play MOO 2 for the rest of your life, but I prefer some variety.
And is there something inherently wrong about a good shooter like Half Life 2? Are games like Battlefield 2 in which good tactics will make the team successful mindless?

Re:8 out of 10

[Total_Wimp]

The article actually mentions other fanless solutions. It point out that the thing making this card unique is the swiveling heat sink/pipe that takes advantage of the airflow from your CPU cooler.

I think the twisting alone buys it a mention, but I think it could be made better. What we really want is for the thing to twist automatically with a loud WHIRRRR and then click into place with a satisfying Ker-Chunck. And it should do this only when it starts to heat up, like right after you start your game. Then a sexy voice should say, "cooling system operating at maximum capacity captain."

That's what we all want, right? You with me? Guys? (grumble. head down) "ok, back to the basement."

TW

Um... but

[Allen Zadr]

It seems to depend on a CPU fan. Hardly "silent". Your just eliminating one fan from a multi-fan system. How would it work on a fanless CPU setup?

Somehow I'm thinking fried silica.

Re:Um... but

[bedroll]

It seems to depend on a CPU fan. Hardly "silent". Your just eliminating one fan from a multi-fan system. How would it work on a fanless CPU setup?

Simple: It wouldn't. That's okay, though, you'd just pick a different solution to the problem. Just because it doesn't allow you to go fanless doesn't mean that eliminating the one fan wouldn't lessen the noise coming from the system. If I'm building a quiet rig and my options were this and a CPU fan or having a card with a fan and a CPU fan, I'd take this.

Re:Um... but

[Smidge204]

The way I read it, the radiator is large enough to safely handle the load without any forced convection.

However, they mounted the heat pipe and radiator on a hinge so that, if you have a CPU fan, you can get an added benefit without adding another fan.

Failing that, you can rotate it to avoid other things in the case and get optimal orientation for natural convection/other drafts.
=Smidge=

Re:Um... but

[markdesign]

what if.. AMD does come out with a fanelss cpu where a big heat sink would stick out toward the video card's fan.

Re:Um... but

[Anonymous Coward]

what if.. AMD does come out with a fanelss cpu

Hahahahahahahahahehehehaahaha! Woo.

Re:Um... but

[cerelib]

Eliminating one fan in a multi-fan system is a good thing. To me it seems that most cases were not designed for efficient cooling. People just slap big fans on and call it a day. Most of the time it does not seem that anybody takes into account where the air goes after it passes the heatsinks. If you have multiple fans you are, most likely, not pushing air in a unified direction. A way to have more efficient systems is to have more efficient heatsinks rather than just slapping fans on PCI cards.

Re:Um... but

[Eugene]

Opteron EE will be a good candidate.. 1.4Ghz tops out at 30W

Re:Um... but

[Mercano]

Or Intel. Yes, yes, I know it will never hapen on a P4 core, but I've heard good things about the Pentium M's impending transition to the desktop. If nothing else, I expect it to have a throttling fan that will hopefully turn completly off under low loads.

Re:Um... but

[macklin01]

As others mentioned, this isn't intended for a case with zero airflow. But the benefit is clear: rather than cooling the video card with a fast, whiny 40mm or 60mm fan, you can take advantage of the existing case airflow from one or two slow, quiet 120mm fans. Since the case should already have some good airflow anyway (passive video cooler or not), this is a net win. :-) -- Paul

Re:Um... but

[hawkbug]

....as you type that on your Pentium IV which dissapates 110W into your room negating the need for you to run your heater.... while I type this on my Athlon 64 3200 90 nano SOI which runs at 27 C under load....

Re:Um... but

[pla]

It seems to depend on a CPU fan. Hardly "silent". Your just eliminating one fan from a multi-fan system. How would it work on a fanless CPU setup?

I have a fanless XFX card with the GF6600, and it doesn't use any tricks to exploit other fans in the system. It runs a tad warm, but within the spec'd range - Around 55C idle, up to around 70C under heavy use.

Personally, I like keeping everything as cool as possible, so "modded" my case to have a low-RPM 120mm fam blow nice cool air on it, which drops it by 10-15C, but it doesn't cook itself without that, and it certainly doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as the GF4 it replaced (with a frickin' jet engine strapped to it, louder than anything else in the system).

Re:Um... but

[Dun Malg]

It seems to depend on a CPU fan. Hardly "silent". Your just eliminating one fan from a multi-fan system. How would it work on a fanless CPU setup?

I suspect a large radiator like that might be enough on its own to cool via convection, even inside the case. Even if it does require a separate fan, I must say that's a welcome change. Since the day video cards started requiring active cooling, that cheap-ass little crap-fan has consistently been the noisiest and most failure-prone thing in every system I've owned. I have a year old GeForce FX 5600 in my current system that's on its THIRD fan.

Overkill

[Radres]

Great for home theater since it's silent.

Or you can just buy a cheap old 2D card with no 3D acceleration since all you are doing is rendering video!

Re:Overkill

[Tha_Big_Guy23]

Or you can just buy a cheap old 2D card with no 3D acceleration since all you are doing is rendering video!

Well, the problem with that solution is that the older 2D cards aren't fast enough to display the full screen rendering of high definition video. Granted, all we're doing is 2D, but at the point at which it's put into a home theater setup, the video card is taking most of the grunt work of decoding the video from the processor. At least, that was how I thought it was working these days.

Re:Overkill

[Tiger4]

No dammit! Not good enough. I must have the fastest 30fps video rendering available!!

Re:Overkill

[giorgiofr]

That's exactly what I think everytime I read a review where they cite HTPCs. You don't need any high-end card to render video. A GeForce 2 will be more than adequate. Heck, I watched a DVD-res movie on a very old non-accelerated 2MB PCI card, a Mach64 dating back to 1997 - guess what: every few seconds it skipped some frames and the refresh rate was 60 Hz. So, get anything built in 2000 and you'll be ok.

Re:Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but the second I buy an old 2D rendering card a newer 2D rendering card will come on the market and mine will be obsolete.

Re:Overkill

[Jeffrey Baker]

Eh? A Matrox Millienium was perfectly able to scale and convert the colorspace of 1920x1080 video. That card had no fan and came out 8 years ago (at least).

Re:Overkill

[fyrie]

No offense, but you are obviously not in the know of what it takes to run a HTPC. Upscailing DVD to HD with an upscaling such as ffdshow is extremely GPU intensive. I am running a 6600gt and it BARELY makes the cut for 1280 720p. I have read that a 6600 won't do 1080i, but a 6800 will.

Re:Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can just buy a cheap old 2D card with no 3D acceleration since all you are doing is rendering video!

So you've got this P4 class machine hooked up to a 60" hdtv screen with surround sound ... you and/or your kids aren't going to be mighty tempted to pop in a game or two?

Sorry. I don't buy that.

Re:Overkill

[Radres]

If you can afford HDTV, then $250 for a video card is probably not going to break the bank for you. If you're just recording SDTV, you can get away with a much cheaper solution.

Re:Overkill

[Jeffrey Baker]

That must be some ass-bad programming, because I just tried scaling a DVD to full screen on a 2048x1536 display, and it worked perfectly well on a Rage 128, a Matrox Millenium II, and a Matrox G400, all of which are at least 4 years out of production. The r128 is in a machine with a 400MHz PowerPC, too. So if you are having trouble getting 720p output from modern hardware, your software is to blame.

Re:Overkill

[kosmosik]

My:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x] (rev a4)

which has 3D accelleration and so on does not have any fan... And this is far too decent to just play movies. This post (meaning parent /. post not yours, mind you ;) is plain stupid. You do not need modern GFX card to play movies. :) Card from '98 will perfectly do the job. :)

Re:Overkill

[snark23]

No kidding.. I just bought gf 6600, and it gets about 11800 frames per second on glxgears... why on earth would you need that for a media box?

Re:Overkill

[cyberbrown]

Just try playing h.264 videos with an old (or not-so-powerful) video card.

Re:Overkill

[MobyDisk]

No.

I watched DVD video scaled to 1024x768 on 600Mhz PCs with low-end 3D PCI cards years ago. If your system is having trouble doing that, you probably have a slow DVD drive or some other bottleneck. I currently do this on my 900Mhz HTPC with an old ATI Radeon 9200 that I bought for $50. It doesn't have a fan either, just a heat sink.

Re:Overkill

[TheLongshot]

Or you can just buy a cheap old 2D card with no 3D acceleration since all you are doing is rendering video!

Actually, with the Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) added with DirectX 9, video rendering can now use the 3D engine to render video. Read up on it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/directshow/htm/vmrvspreviousdirects howrenderers.asp Jason

Re:Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

What video card can do video decoding? Sure, some can do dvd/mpeg2 on card but that's rare isn't it? And if you've gone the computer home theatre setup (as one obviously has with a video card) then you'll probably be watching xvid, divx, etc., does video cards help with these less mainstream formats.

Re:Overkill

[TheGavster]

I've been doing full-screen DVD since I got my first DVD drive in 1997. Back then, you needed a hardware decoder card for the MPEG2 stream if you didn't have a decent processor, but displaying 30fps 1280x1024 video hasn't been an issue for a long long time. It may be that your GeForce card is supporting some stream decoding operations (at least a couple of my cards boasted "MPEG2 decoder!" on the box), but you don't need a top-end card for the fill rate.

Re:Overkill

[Ziviyr]

Actually, I imagine breaking the fields apart and adding some mumbo-jumbo to the end of decoding at 60FPS is not unreasonable.

Re: Overkill

[Crouty]

Or you can just buy a cheap old 2D card with no 3D acceleration since all you are doing is rendering video!

Totally sensible, but can you? It seems on-board VGA lacks motion compensation and cards that do motion compensation come with quazillions of high-clocked transistors and tons of heat dissipation. Cheapest cards at my local store are ATI 7000, GeForce4 MX 440 or ATI 9250SE/TD. They are mostly harmless, but still eat more power than necessary for watching dvds.

Re:Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably as retarded as the audiophiles.

Re:Overkill

[Jeffrey Baker]

I do think the HTPC community is generally ignorant and ill-informed, yes. But the graphics manufacturers are not retarded, they are exploitative: they see this mass of ignorant, ill-informed people as an opportunity to sell some $400 parts. And here you are, claiming that video scaling is anything other than a simple filtering operation.

Unless of course you would like to share the magical secret of video scaling which you seem to think was not implemented in hardware until after 2002.

I won't hold my breath.

Re:Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

The Matrox G400 offers proper hardware scaling... buttmunch.

Seriously, do you think people in the HTPC community and the graphics manufacturers are retarded, and that you just know everything?

No, I suspect he probably thinks that most of you GFX d00ds are lamerz who wank over how many transistors are on your cardz... and how big the fan iz, and how you need a 700W power supply just to play Unreal Tournament with all the options on at 2048x1024.

In other words, you're like audio-philes. Fuck, you probably have gold-plated connectors and special digital cables that cost you an extra $50... for that extra special monitor clarity.

Re:Overkill

[John Hurliman]

Using ffdshow along with various other software upscalers is generally cycle-intensive because of the post-processing, not the actual scaling. You don't need any software to upscale on an HTPC, just turn your resolution up. But if you want denoise filters, unsharp masks, deinterlacing, etc. you're going to need some power. But last time I checked there was no GPU acceleration for any of those filters, the burden was on the CPU. Maybe that's changed since I last looked in to it.

Re:Overkill

[poot_rootbeer]

Upscailing DVD to HD with an upscaling such as ffdshow is extremely GPU intensive

Why would you do that, though? It's not as if the DVD was encoded with any extra detail that doesn't show up at 480p standard resolution.

Besides which, if your HDTV is capable of displaying 720p at native resolution, it's probably already upscaling your 480p signal for you.

Re:Overkill

[RedWizzard]

A GeForce 2 will be more than adequate.

A GeForce 2 will be more than adequate in terms of performance, but it'll probably have terrible TV-out picture quality. It's only fairly recently that much attention has been paid to the TV-out quality so a newer graphics card is likely to look a lot better.

Re:Overkill

[RedWizzard]

the video card is taking most of the grunt work of decoding the video from the processor. At least, that was how I thought it was working these days.

AFAIK most cards will only decode mpeg2, if that. There's been talk of adding mpeg4 decoding but I don't think it's been done yet. But unless you're building a machine with a ridiculously slow CPU decoding anything short of H.264 is not a problem.

Re:Overkill

[RedWizzard]

Just try playing h.264 videos with an old (or not-so-powerful) video card.

How the hell is a powerful video card going to help decoding H.264? It's the CPU that's struggling.

Re:Overkill

[enrico_suave]

please mod previous poster up.

VMR9 with FSE (full screen exclusive mode) for HD content isn't a light task and does take advantage of nvidia GPU over CPU cycles.

I've tried playing back ota HDTV content in linux on a modest AMD xp 1700 with a geforce MX420 and it does have rudimentary XvmC support which helped a lot in both xine and mplayer. Without acceleration it was a slide show. I've been meaning to shlop the 5200 in there and see if it played back the hdtv .ts's more smoothly or not...

I know it'll be heresy around here, but the 6600 and higher nvidia cards also have WMVHD accellearation in addition to mpeg2 accelleration...

Hey if you've got a geforce 2 or one of those old matrox's and can playback HDTV mpeg streams god bless ya! That hasn't been my experience to date.

I do think it's a waste to have some uber video card with gobs of ram/3d capabilities just to get these media processing features. I usually suggest buying slightly behind the curve (like these 6600's and 6800's) for HTPC use, but I'm a cheap bastage,YMMV!

e.

Re:Overkill

[HawkingMattress]

Or if you use a modern card in a home theater environment, you can probably just unplug the fan...
The card probably doens't need it at all if all it has to do is 2d work.
I know i've been doing that with a gf3 for 1 year without a problem.

Re:Overkill

[Superfarstucker]

It only takes ~ 40% cpu time on a ~2.5 GHz AXP (~4000+) for the 720p, compare that with i/o intense operations (not saying video playback isn't) ) which still manage to eat 80% cpu time (at least when iTunes does it) like scanning tracks to normalize volume. i suppose a ~2600+ CPU isn't that common these days, but by the time HD content hits mainstream (if ever), a processor powerful enough to do 720p, or even 1080p will be the cheapest of the cheap.

Re:Overkill

[Pulzar]

But if you want denoise filters, unsharp masks, deinterlacing, etc. you're going to need some power. But last time I checked there was no GPU acceleration for any of those filters, the burden was on the CPU. Maybe that's changed since I last looked in to it.

All of those things are now done using pixel shaders on the GPU, if available.

Re:Overkill

[Pulzar]

How the hell is a powerful video card going to help decoding H.264? It's the CPU that's struggling.

New video cards have H.264 hardware decoding built in. Within a year or so, even new integrated graphics will have H.264 hardware decoding, since everybody is going nuts over it.

Re:Overkill

[RedWizzard]

New video cards have H.264 hardware decoding built in.

You mean the nVidia 7800 series, available for the low, low price of what, $500+? People are looking for entire HTPC setups for less than that. And the driver that supports H.264 decoding is still in beta (though nVidia's drivers are usually pretty good, even at beta level).

ATI have made announcements but aren't shipping anything, right?

Re:Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty bad. I play DVDs on my HDTV at 720p through a Mac mini, and it works pretty well with its crappy little on-board 32 MB Radeon adapter. Once in a while the display will shear a little, but 99.9% of the time it's perfect. I also play videos fullscreen with mplayer, and that works well too.

Re:Overkill

[fyrie]

Ever seen an upscailing DVD player? They are sold all over the place and for big bux. Same idea. It's about trying to make the image look the best that it can on a HD display. Simply blindly upsampling produces a bad image. This is old news.

Re:Overkill

[fyrie]

You are missing the point. Blindly upscaling isn't going to give you the best picture. All HDTVs will upscale the image for you, yet there is a HUGE market for upscailing DVD players. Why? Because all upscailing isn't equal. Go read the HTPC forums on www.avsforum.com .

Re:Overkill

[fyrie]

You sir, do not know what you are talking about when it comes to upscaling to HDTV. However, you are not lying when it comes to watching something on 1024x768. If you wish to become more educated on the topic, go read the HDTV forum on www.avsforum.com

Re:Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever seen those air "tornado" creators they sell to increase fuel mileage in cars and trucks? They sell them all over the place for big bux.

Too bad they do bugger all.

You can do things like removing errors, or trying to correct obvious flaws in the original source. but you can't magically make things have the necessary information for better quality images.

Re:Overkill

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, you can do that. you may have seen algorithms like that at work in emulators like mame. See http://elektron.its.tudelft.nl/~dalikifa/ for info

*Now* they make one

[AKAImBatman]

But sometimes, you just want a little silence. For example, if you're building a home-theater PC, you'll want as quiet a system as possible.

Well, that would have been nice to be able to recommend when I wrote this article. I had also recommended an Asus GeForce 6600, albeit one that didn't cost quite as much. For myself (not being an audiophile), the cheaper card works fine as it rarely spins up to any noticable volume while I'm watching TV. I can understand, though, that for others the background noise can be very annoying.

As you can see, the card is actually designed to take advantage of a preexisting CPU cooling fan to blow air over the passive radiator. If you have a standard active cooling mount, then this is an innovative idea. But it does limit your choice of CPU coolers. For one thing, your processor heat sink can't be taller than the bottom of the card.

So what they're saying is that the ASUS Star Ice Jet Engine^W^W CPU Fan isn't going to work with this card? What a shocker. ;-)

(No, I won't let go of it. I've still got mine sitting on my desk, just so I can get all the "What the hell is that?" comments. )

Nvidia's upcoming Release 80 drivers include a number of enhancements for HDTV, including the ability to minimize overscan problems, something which has plagued home-theater PCs for years.

This reminds me, has anyone had any experience with this or any other HDTV-compatible cards that don't cost an arm and a leg? I'm still avoiding HD for now, but it's likely to catch eventually. To date I haven't seen too many inexpensive HDTV tuner cards. Then again, maybe I'm not looking hard enough?

Re:*Now* they make one

[goldspider]

I read your post last week, and let me tell ya, it got my gears turning!

I wanted to use the setup as a gaming system in addition to handling all my home theatre needs, but one question remained. Isn't there some length threshold for the DVI cable beyond which the picture starts to degrade? Perhaps that only is an issue with current analog cables, but I was wondering what you would do if you kept the PC fairly far away from the TV.

Otherwise, an inspiring article. I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on some of the XPS systems (such as the Kloss KL-i915A) in your Synergystic PC design.

Re:*Now* they make one

[AKAImBatman]

Isn't there some length threshold for the DVI cable beyond which the picture starts to degrade?

DVI is digital, so you either have a signal lock or you don't. Which is to say, that the cable is still going to experience the same problems as any other cable, it's just that you're going to simply lose the signal instead of experiencing degradation. This link should help you pick a cable that meets your needs. Be warned, though, 10 meters is probably about the most you'll manage to get.

Otherwise, an inspiring article. I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on some of the XPS systems (such as the Kloss KL-i915A) in your Synergystic PC design.

I'm glad you liked the article. :-)

I'm afraid I'm not a big fan of small case designs, so I don't have much to say on the Kloss. I've always looked for a big case to provide plenty of space for airflow. Reducing the form factor reduces your ability to dissapate heat. Reducing your ability to dissapate heat means that you can't use the components to their fullest capacity OR you have to put up with a noisy fan. (You should hear my iBook's fan when I'm watching a movie with it on my lap. Sounds like someone's got a buzzsaw running in my room.)

Re:*Now* they make one

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not recommend one of the via motherboards? They are small, quiet, and have integrated mpeg rendering support...its a no brainer.

Re:*Now* they make one

[AKAImBatman]

1. I don't like Via. (Maybe it's just prejudice from back in the day, but...)

2. I wanted it to be a fully featured board that users could count on for everything from TV to gaming to office work. Having capacity for 10 USB ports, 4 SATA-II drives, IDE, PCI Express, Hardware Firewall, and 8 Channel sound is definitely my idea of "fully featured". It's pretty hard to beat an nForce4 board in this area. :-)

3. I have experience with the particular board I recommended. That way I know I'm giving people a good recommendation and not just another "expert" opinion from someone who doesn't eat his own dog food.

Does it glow in the dark?

[kianu7]

The silent feature is cool and all, but what we technofiles really want to know is does it glow in the dark?

Re:Does it glow in the dark?

[DrLex]

If you overclock it hard enough, I bet those heatsinks will start to glow. For a few milliseconds.

Nostalgia

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice picture on the first page. It looks familiar. Does anybody else remember having Bristle Blocks as a kid?

You can have my voodoo3

[Anonymous Coward]

when you pry it out my cold, dead hands.

Not new

[mqRakkis]

Gigabyte has been selling a fanless 6600GT for a while now, the GV-NX66T256D.

Re:Not new

[Anonymous Coward]

Gigabyte has been selling a fanless 6600GT for a while now

Yup! In addition, I've seen a fanless plain Jane 6800 from them on Newegg as well.

Re:Not new

[piquadratCH]

Great job. You just fucked up ASUS' well paid commercial. Pay attention next time. ;-)

Re:Not new

[grumpyman]

Dude, my ASUS TNT2 from 5 years ago is fanless too :)

Re:Not new

[imr]

Yes, and it's a great card, with a much less weird looking and probably more practical cooler.

Re:Not new

[astromog]

I've had one of their fanless 6600GTs for a few months now, and it's an amazing piece of work. The heat sink (my one has a less elaborate and more chunky looking one) does its job wonderfully. No need for weird looking heatsinks like that Asus one, unless your case has some serious airflow problems. I can get full performance out of the card without any heat problems at all. Naturally, I couldn't overclock it, but that's fine by me because I'm not into overclocking. I love the fact that my system's performance went up while its noise level plummeted (previous card had two little whiny 4cm fans).

Re:Not new

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, Sapphire has been making fanless (or large, quiet fan) cards for some time as well. I have their Radeon 9800 XT Ultimate card and it is silent and yet still very fast. They have the latest and greatest in silent configuration as well:

http://www.sapphiretech.com/en/products/graphics_o verview.php?gpid=120

Re:Not new

[captain_craptacular]

I have one. Great card, hasn't missed a beat in the 5 months or so that I've owned it. Not only is it fanless, it's "overclocked" by some amount straight from the factory (maybe 5-10%)... It's also a VIVO card, meaning it can capture digital video (which interestingly enough was a standard feature of the 6600, which hardly anyone bothered to implement).

and this makes news how?

[Anonymous Coward]

/yay for slashdot exploiting its popularity by sullying it and its readers with slashvertisements....

make Loyd Case of ExtremeTech go crazy day

[dangil]

another slashdot sponsored make somebody crazy day.......
the server is already down

Useless

[Snoolas]

I have a 6600GT with a fan, and it isn't loud at all. Just put up with it. You'll never notice the sound difference unless you don't have any other fans in your computer. If you don't have any fans in your computer, you're fried. Water cooling units make noise, unless you have a Zalman reserator. Let the enthusiasts have their fun...

Re:Useless

[AKAImBatman]

Personally, I agree with you. But for some people, the fan noise is REALLY bothersome. Especially those who have tuned their ears to hear with precision. (i.e. The audiophile.)

That being said, I think the problem tends to be exasperated by poor cases. One of the primary points you have to look for when chosing a case is "does air flow well?" The case should be roomy enough to allow air to flow smoothly from the front of the case to the rear. Usually you'll have a fan in the rear of the case, but having mounts available for one in the front is usually not a bad idea either.

More fans can mean less RPM per fan for the same cooling. If it's slow enough, it should be practically impossible to hear. This concept is used heavily in the PowerMacs which have a boat-load of fans that spin at very low RPM.

If your case is too small or two crowded, what you'll see is a buildup of heat. This buildup will be noticed by the components such as the video card which will immediately spin the fan up to a higher RPM in an attempt to reduce the heat levels. And thus you end up with: a very noisy computer.

Re:Useless

[karnal]

I have a 6600gt with a fan in my main gaming machine, and I would not want to add that kind of noise - no matter how insignificant you may find it - to my home theater machine.

As such, I went with a fanless Asus FX5200. Turns out that the NVidia DVD/MPEG2 decoder does the best job on this decently powerful system as a PVR box. Plus, the less fans I have, the less "whoosh" noise. Which in a home theater/PVR environment is a necessity.

Re:Useless

[moonbender]

What's not loud to you is really loud to others. You can't run most modern PCs fanless, but you can run them with just one or two fans at a REALLY low voltage, so that they are very quiet and effectively silent at one metre. You really can't say whether or not the fan on the graphics card is loud or not unless you already have taken great care choosing the other components.

Re:Useless

[superpulpsicle]

I have no problem if the fan fry. I have a problem however with the warranties getting nulled when you try to replace the fan yourself.

Re:Useless

[lemkebeth]

Or you could just be going deaf like us poor late deafened people.

I wouldn't notice the noise unless there was a vibration or it was really loud.

Re:Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

"exacerbated", not "exasperated"

Your posts tend to be very intelligent, so I'm hoping that you'll take this in the spirit of polishing a diamond, rather than as a criticism.

Re:Useless

[AKAImBatman]

Thanks, I keep doing that. Something between the head and fingers on the keyboard gets the word messed up. Just keep pointing it out and I'll get it eventually. :-)

The 6600 silencer works great.

[leoxx]

I just built an AMD X2 3800 system with the 6600 (non-GT) Silencer for my wife, who is not a video game player, and it is cool, quiet, cheap and plenty fast for what she needs. Combined with the Antec Sonata II case it makes for probably the nicest Linux system I have ever put together.

Re:The 6600 silencer works great.

[ryanvm]

I just built an AMD X2 3800 system with the 6600 (non-GT) Silencer for my wife; it is cool, quiet, cheap and plenty fast

And I'll bet she still complains that you never do anything sweet. Women...

Re:The 6600 silencer works great.

[harryk]

You just built your wife a AMD x2 3800 ... and I'm trying to think of why?

Don't you think thats a bit over kill .. your disposable income is obviously far greater than mine...

I just peiced together a p2 system for my wife, which is still overkill for what she needs ...

Re:The 6600 silencer works great.

[romeo_in_blk_jeans]

I'm kinda curious myself.

Hardcore development? Recompiling the whole OS in 10 minutes or less?

Or maybe just instant gratification? ;)

Re:The 6600 silencer works great.

[leoxx]

You just built your wife a AMD x2 3800 ... and I'm trying to think of why?

You're right, I should have gotten her something faster.

Don't you think thats a bit over kill .. your disposable income is obviously far greater than mine... I just peiced together a p2 system for my wife, which is still overkill for what she needs ...

Your problem is that you are assuming that my wife is like your wife. Unfortunately I don't think that is true. My wife needs a fast computer because she writes a lot of computationally intensive code in C, Matlab and Maple. And while she doesn't play video games, she does use some OpenGL here and there too. Her last computer (a P3 1Ghz) just wasn't cutting it any more.

Re:The 6600 silencer works great.

[Tony Hoyle]

My wife has a better machine than me!

She play FFXI a lot, which on the graphics intensive stuff (waterfalls, etc.) with lots of other players in the same area as you (once counted 200) can bury anything less than a 6800GT . She gets really uppity if the frame rate drops below 30fps, so her machine has more memory, a faster processor and much better graphics than any of mine. It also has to have uber fans to cope with it...

Re:The 6600 silencer works great.

[leoxx]

I am not sure why you guys think this is a big deal, not including her existing monitor which I re-used, the whole system cost about $1G CDN. Some idiots pay nearly that much just for a video card.

Oh and it does a complete 2.6.13 kernel compile (modules and all) in 3 minutes 27 seconds. :) All my wife cares about, though, is that she can run her cell simulation code in a reasonable amount of time.

Re:The 6600 silencer works great.

[code_elite]

X2 3800, 6600, Linux... for your wife. Sure with my wife would fall for that when I said the new truck and HDTV were "for her".

Re:The 6600 silencer works great.

[toddestan]

You just built your wife a AMD x2 3800 ... and I'm trying to think of why?

Obviously he's in it for the extra CPU cycles. Quite likely the computer is used for encoding DVDs in the background, and when it would otherwise be idle it acts as a node in his home SETI@Home cluster. And she has absolutely no idea any of this is occuring.

Re:The 6600 silencer works great.

[EntropyMan]

Is there such a thing as "+1 pwn3d"?

Re:The 6600 silencer works great.

[harryk]

wow .. way to get defensive. perhaps you could have been more clear on the intent of the system build ... I was trying to make a joke, not start flamewar...

nice

Re:The 6600 silencer works great.

[leoxx]

Sorry, I guess I missed the joke. I am not sure I understand why it is necessary to give a REASON for my wife to have a fast computer.

Should work in free air

[CaptainFork]

In a closed PC, this device will basically rely on the power supply's fan to circulate air around the heatsink. But if you were to run your PC with the case open (as open as possible) there should be sufficient free-air cooling.

You should keep your room cool (which you should do anyway when gaming because warmth will make you soperific and slow your reactions). You may also want to use a mosquito net or other gauze-like sheild to stop dust accumulating on your hardware.

Re:Should work in free air

[VoidWraith]

Something made out of metal would be the better choice, because it would also serve as a Faraday cage, which is important if you use wireless devices like cellphones nearby, or use wireless networking. Computers put out a lot of RFI.

This isn't new!

[mustafap]

I've had a fanless graphics card since 1983. Still got it. Hercules MDA.
Pah!

Re:This isn't new!

[Pegasus]

MDA? You mean those where you can't even shift+pageup in the console, since it only has memory for 80x25 characters? Bah ... grow up man, get a Tseng ET4000. It's still the fastest card in the txt mode.

Re:This isn't new!

[Jeffrey Baker]

Is it? I've been wondering this lately. I still have an ET4000 2MB card layout around, but it doesn't seem as fast in text mode as the Millenium.

Pain in the ASP

[Anonymous Coward]

The include file '/component/util_generate_article_discussion_info/ 0,1460,d=5178,00.asp' was not found.

Ahh the wonders of ASP.net.

Re:Pain in the ASP

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that would be ASP, not ASP.NET. I know it's fun to bash, but you simply look like a moron if you don't know what you are talking about.

Moron...

I must be old.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when graphics cards weren't supposed to have fans or heat sinks.

whisper soft!

[eck011219]

Wow, between this and the silent power supply yesterday, the only thing that's left is a silent sound card!

Re:whisper soft!

[HugePedlar]

What the fuck would you want a silent sou...

Oh right. Joke.

Re:whisper soft!

[KiloByte]

I got several of them. Would you want to swap one of them for one that produces sound?

Re:whisper soft!

[poot_rootbeer]

the only thing that's left is a silent sound card!

Shit, I'd be happy just to find one that doesn't have interference from other cards on the PCI bus audible on the analog line-out.

Big, slow, and few

[Anonymous Coward]

I like to have the minimum fans in my system. The problem with graphics card fans (and chipset fans for that matter) is that they are tiny and fast, and make more noise (and are more prone to failure from what I've seen).

My current system runs with this card (a fanless 6600 from Gigabyte. Not the GT version though). I just have a big cooler for the CPU (Zalman CNPS7700AlCu), a decent PSU with a 12cm fan, and a single 12cm fan for the case. I also replaced the chipset cooler fan with a fanless heatsink from zalman (ZM-NB47J), which makes it run hotter, but it is acceptable. The noise level is very low overall.

Re:Big, slow, and few

[fyrie]

I've got two of those in my SLI gaming rig. At first I thought they overclocked fine until I threw Battlefield 2 at it. Using 3d mark and Aqua mark, I could overclock to 540/1.14. With battlefield 2 I'm at 533/1.11 and I'm still getting texture corruption after about 30 mins or so. It'll be sad when I have to lower the memory below what the card shipped at. If I could do it all over again, I probably would have gotten 1 6800. Oh well....

I bulit a fanless OC'd 7800GTX

[Anonymous Coward]

Only problem was you had to replace it after viewing each movie. Sometimes it wouldn't even last till the end of the movie.

Talk about a waste of money...

[__aailob1448]

You don't *NEED* 3D acceleration on a home theater system. Just pick up a motherboard with an integrated intel graphic chip (8xx or 9xx) and you're good to go. This card does not have a niche. Only idiots will buy it.

Re:Talk about a waste of money...

[fyrie]

If you want to get a really great image quality via an upscailing plug-in such as ffdshow, you most certainly need a high end gfx card. The 6600gt barely cuts it for 720p. I should know because I have one in my HTPC.

Re:Talk about a waste of money...

[KillShill]

all ffdshow algorithms are cpu-only.

so i'm wondering what you're really referring to.

show me some links please.

Re:Talk about a waste of money...

[fyrie]

Right.. But then you need to render them using VMR9/yv12. go read the www.avsforum.com boards. Many think that a 6600gt is a waste of time there (too weak).

Re:Talk about a waste of money...

[KillShill]

i'm aware of that but even a video card from 3 generations ago could handle it quite well.

and a 6600gt is overkill for that.

i wouldn't say it's a waste of time though.

the pure video on it might be quite helpful in a HT setup.

Re:Talk about a waste of money...

[BushCheney08]

It sounds like you guys are making a major tradeoff just because you can. You're talking about things that a $100 general purpose CPU can handle quite effectively, yet you're insisting on making a $300+ GPU do it, rather ineffectively i might add, just because someone provided the interface for it. I'm not saying it won't be very handy to offload a lot of this stuff to pixel shaders in the future, but right now, it seems like it's a very immature solution, especially since that GPU's real features will go largely unused. As someone else already pointed out, this sounds a whole lot like the audiophiles -- you have an inkling of what you're dealing with and talking about, but in practice it's obvious to everyone else that you're getting totally fleeced.

Gigabyte has a similar model

[Stack_13]

Gigabyte has a similar model: a heatpipe-cooled Gigabyte Geforce 6600GT with a easy-to-remember name of Gigabyte GV-NX66T128VP. Tom's Hardware has a review of the card. AGP version is also available with a similarly easy model name of GV-N66T128VP.

I have a PCI Express version of the card in my rig, and it is nice. Gets too hot to touch after running GPU-intensive applications, but those NV chips should be designed to run hot (and they have a thermal protection which throttles down the GPU if it gets overheated).

Nice to see other manufacturers to notice that people like to have their computers silent.

Let's call it a graphics card with an external fan

[Minwee]

"Fanless" is a bit of an overstatement. The article is very clear on the fact that this card comes with a giant radiator which needs to be cooled by... you guessed it. A fan.

It's a nice idea that it can use an existing CPU or case fan for cooling, but I would hate to see someone try using this in a passively cooled or water cooled system.

Another ad?

[Jim Hall]

Isn't it enough that we have ads on the site already, without being presented with slashvertisements? Mod me a troll if you will, but I think I've been seeing more of this lately.

isn't call of duty 2 using 512mb graphics cards...

[ruiner5000]

more interesting. I mean we reviewed this Asus card 10 days ago. The real news is the 512mb card finally being used by COD2.

I have a similar card without a hinge...

[NIN1385]

I bought a ASUS 128mb video card about two months ago from newegg. The card has no fan on it, and run relatively cool considering the games I play with it. I paid a mere $42 plus shipping and I couldn't be happier with the performance I got with it.

I would recommend any ASUS product so far, havent had any problems with my motherboard or video card, both ASUS. If your looking for a cheap, powerful video card with a few high-end features, these cards are ideal. Good work ASUS.

Re:I have a similar card without a hinge...

[Chimera512]

i've had an asus mobo in this box for 3 years in december and it's always run without a hitch, i put the newwer model of this board in 3 other builds and have worked great. asus makes quality stuff in my experience.

All fanless system is not that hard or expensive

[ylikone]

I run a completely fanless system. I used a fanless PSU, fanless CPU cooler (heat pipes), fanless graphics, fanless case. I run it with the case open. Not that expensive. Don't need water pumps because there is no water cooling involved. Just fanless parts with big heat sinks and pipes. I keep the air conditioning on in the house anyway so it is cool enough. In the winter, I just don't heat the computer room at all (the computers do it for me).

Looks interesting

[rikkards]

but how does it compare to a ATI 9800Pro? Next time I buy one I probably will get something like this.

Umm.. they all used to be

[DJStealth]

Why is this innovation?

Up until 3 years ago, it would be rare to find a video card with a fan in it.
10 Years ago, most CPU's didn't even have fans on them.

the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[ClioCJS]

...was an Asus graphic card.

I was pantless and in no mood for my computer to be on fire when I turned it on!

The fan also died and I had a room-fan pointed inside my open case for a month or two. (Yes, I procrastinate.)

That's still no excuse for catching on fire TWO SECONDS after turning on a machine that had been off for hours.

When I RMA'ed it, they didn't send it back for 4 months. Finally, I called, long distance, and they didn't know where to send it. USE THE RETURN ADDRESS FOOLS. I even included their required piece of paper inside the box with my address and RMA number as well.

DON'T DEAL WITH THESE PEOPLE... Good video cards come out of Canada (ATI), NOT Asia!

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[F_Scentura]

Your anecdotal evidence doesn't necessarily speak for the whole, you know.

Asus is a relatively decent manufacturer, and in my dealings with them working for a larger OEM my main complaint is more with their poorly maintained website than any hardware issues.

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[Anonymous Coward]

Good video cards come out of Canada (ATI), NOT Asia!

Too bad good drivers don't also come out of Canada (ATI)

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[ClioCJS]

Their s-video out was the worst I've seen, ATI being the best.

(I've computed almost exclusively on my television since 1995.)

Their video capture was ABYSMAL, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

Their 3-d goggles were an $80 waste of a gimmick and never worked.

The game I got with the packaging was not the one advertised.

Fuck those asianses.

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[ClioCJS]

It's just a matter of finding the right one, and STICKING WITH IT. But yea, their drivers suck.

My video capture eventually died. I wont re-install windows; I spent 2 yrs and the installation I have has all 200+ programs I regularly use. I mean sure, I can't kill processes with the windows process manager, but I've learned how to use Cygwin's port of the unix kill command very well and even have scripts that auto-kill all the BS windows processes and strip me down to 12 or so processes. Yay!

But I digress.

I ended up getting a Hauppage video capture card, and I run the open-source BTxWin(I think that's what they are called) video capture drivers which work well with virtualdub.

If using the ATI drivers, there is a VFM driver wrapper that wraps the ATI's WDM interface into a VFM interface, so that you can still use VirtualDub with an ATI card. Assuming you're not me and it's broken inexplicably. It's 35K, and I will mail it to anyone who needs it.

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[J. T. MacLeod]

DON'T DEAL WITH THESE PEOPLE... Good video cards come out of Canada (ATI), NOT Asia!

Hate to break it to you, but ATI doesn't manufacture their own cards any longer.

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[F_Scentura]

I'm certainly not going to argue with those comptaints, ATI's 2d and video quality *are* superior to most any Nvidia-related offerings.

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[ClioCJS]

Well, if you really want to quibble at an unnecesary level of granularity, the card did "come out" of Canada. It was just made elsewhere first.
--
I'll bet every last fucking cent I own or will ever make that lake was frozen! Christians are such exaggerators! ==A friend of mine
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a moron... Their drivers suck yet you keep using it?

Pffft, it's idiots like you that keep companies that should have gone out of business long ago in business.

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[ClioCJS]

Um........ If the card plays a mean game of Quake3, why would I want to jeopardize my whole setup by swapping it out? And what would I swap it out with? I use my 36-inch tv as my monitor, and ATI has the best TV-out. ANY other card would look worse ALL the time.

You're the fucking moron, cuntwad.

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[ClioCJS]

Um.......... LIKE I'VE SAID IN THE PAST, ATI has the best TV out. I use no monitor. I use a 36-inch TV.

Why the fuck would I dream of switching cards when it's doing exactly what I want? And it plays a mean game of Quake3 too.

The video capture breaking sucked, but I had always wanted a hauppage card anyway. Now I can move my video capture functionality from computer to computer without sacrificing the pristine TV out from my ATI card.

Why the hell would I want a company I love to go out of business? I own an ATI AIW, AIW Pro, AIW Radeon, 8500DV, 9600. I'm on my 5th card. And I'm not stopping.

You're the fucking moron, cuntwad. Probably use a monitor. That's so 1900s.

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.

Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".

Linux zealots are far too forgiving when judging the difficultly of Linux configuration issues and far too harsh when judging the difficulty of Windows configuration issues. Example comments:

User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?" Zealot: "Oh that's easy! If you have Redhat, you have to download quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin, then do chmod +x on the file. Then you have to su to root, make sure you type export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 but ONLY if you have that latest libc6 installed. If you don't, don't set that environment variable or the installer will dump core. Before you run the installer, make sure you have the GL drivers for X installed. Get them at [some obscure web address], chmod +x the binary, then run it, but make sure you have at least 10MB free in /tmp or the installer will dump core. After the installer is done, edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and add a section called "GL" and put "driver nv" in it. Make sure you have the latest version of X and Linux kernel 2.6 or else X will segfault when you start. OK, run the Quake 3 installer and make sure you set the proper group and setuid permissions on quake3.bin. If you want sound, look here [link to another obscure web site], which is a short HOWTO on how to get sound in Quake 3. That's all there is to it!"

User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Windows?" Zealot: "Oh God, I had to install Quake 3 in Windoze for some lamer friend of mine! God, what a fucking mess! I put in the CD and it took about 3 minutes to copy everything, and then I had to reboot the fucking computer! Jesus Christ! What a retarded operating system!"

So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Linux geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Windows.

-- -Clint Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)

Re:the ONLY peripheral to EVER CATCH ON FIRE ---

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.

Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".

Linux zealots are far too forgiving when judging the difficultly of Linux configuration issues and far too harsh when judging the difficulty of Windows configuration issues. Example comments:

User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?" Zealot: "Oh that's easy! If you have Redhat, you have to download quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin, then do chmod +x on the file. Then you have to su to root, make sure you type export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 but ONLY if you have that latest libc6 installed. If you don't, don't set that environment variable or the installer will dump core. Before you run the installer, make sure you have the GL drivers for X installed. Get them at [some obscure web address], chmod +x the binary, then run it, but make sure you have at least 10MB free in /tmp or the installer will dump core. After the installer is done, edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and add a section called "GL" and put "driver nv" in it. Make sure you have the latest version of X and Linux kernel 2.6 or else X will segfault when you start. OK, run the Quake 3 installer and make sure you set the proper group and setuid permissions on quake3.bin. If you want sound, look here [link to another obscure web site], which is a short HOWTO on how to get sound in Quake 3. That's all there is to it!"

User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Windows?" Zealot: "Oh God, I had to install Quake 3 in Windoze for some lamer friend of mine! God, what a fucking mess! I put in the CD and it took about 3 minutes to copy everything, and then I had to reboot the fucking computer! Jesus Christ! What a retarded operating system!"

So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Linux geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Windows.

--
-Clint
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)

6600GT is overkill for home theater

[Junior J. Junior III]

All you need for home theater is good 2-D rendering, 16MB of memory, and a decent TV-out. Seriously. Why do you need 3D accelleration for TV? Does this card even have a TV-tuner?

Re:6600GT is overkill for home theater

[KillShill]

some new video features require a good gfx processor.

it also depends on the capabilities the owner wants.

but your above example is a bare minimum that should work well with most non-picky HT owners.

Re:All fanless system is not that hard or expensiv

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I live in an igloo too.

Actually, why not combine a computer and a fridge? Or just put your computer in the fridge, run a power cord through a small hole you drill through the side, wireless mouse and keyboard, and maybe a video cord through another hole.

Bonus: Using your webcam to see if there's any beer left.

fanless is overrated

[Lumpy]

in a HTPC setup fanless = not a big of a deal. hell the projector over my head makes more noise with it's fan that the 6 in the HTPC up by the screen. Oh let's forget the 2 fans in the AMP/THX decoder the 1 fan on the DVD burner/player and the fan in the replayTV.

if someone is freaked about the tiny bit of noise their fans make so they can watch TV with the volume almost at 0 then they really need to figure things out differently. Every highend home theatre does not waste time with fanlesds and low noise, they simply put the gear outside the room or in a closet with a door.

Going overboard to buy a high power video card (for an HTPC? Why? a $19.00 64 meg cheapie that has good accelerated video works best) and going nuts to make your PC silent may be your hobby, but it has no real value, espically in a Home theatre where you are supposed to be cranking the volume up past a faint whisper.

Re:fanless is overrated

[MobyDisk]

But the importance of heat and power are are underrated. And most of us don't have loud projectors. If I lived next to a freight train then a silent PC might not be significant.

I live in a row house. It has old wiring, very little sound insulation, and no central A/C. My living room isn't big enough for a projector even if I wanted one. In that small room, the sound is noticeable - especially when you aren't watching TV. I prefer a low-power system because I can feel the temperature difference in the room if the PC runs hot. And it limits what I can plug into that circuit. And it means it is too hot to put into an enclosed entertainment center.

So maybe it doesn't matter on your setup, but for mine it is significant.

Re:fanless is overrated

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered that when the TV is off someone would their PC to be as quiet as possible? Sure, if you turn off the PC when you are done watching TV, its fine, but if you leave it on to record shows the noise that is otherwise not there can be annoying.

Well whooptie-doo

[Bastian]

My Voodoo3 card has no fan, either. I got it five years ago.

Re:Well whooptie-doo

[KillShill]

i used to have a v3 as well.

it overheated all the time when playing games causing me to have to reset.

and it got dangerously hot even in 2d.

it was never designed to run only with a heatsink. it was a huge chip made at .35 micron.

Re:NO!!!!! This F$cking Thief and Felon Is (+1, Tr

[mysqlrocks]

Um, I think you meant "failure" not "fanless".

Re:Let's call it a graphics card with an external

[spurtle15]

"Fanless" is a bit of an overstatement. The article is very clear on the fact that this card comes with a giant radiator which needs to be cooled by... you guessed it. A fan.

Darn. I thought you were going to say "Frank Stallone".

So what?

[themepsp]

I really dont see the selling point here?? Since the rest of the box is going to be loud with fans anyway, unless its watercooled.

My vidcard as it stands has a fan on it which is nice and its already very quite.

Re:So what?

[sznupi]

Really? I must be duff then, as is my buddy and his wife who sleep with their heads right beside my computer...

What the hell? This was on digg like 3 days ago!

[Anonymous Coward]

RIDICULOUS!

vapor phase cooling?

[scharkalvin]

Next thing you know, there will be video cards cooled by external
freon (ok, the cfc free stuff) units, like some bozos are now
using for overclocked cpus. Then what, liquid Helium?

I've had a fanless video card for years!

[Stephen Williams]

Well, kinda fanless. My GeForce 2 MX is four years old. At some point between purchase and now, the fan seized up. Hooray for accidental quietness!

The card still works perfectly. I wouldn't like to run a modern card with a seized-up fan, mind...

-Stephen

Re:I've had a fanless video card for years!

[zr-rifle]

The Geforce 2 MX card series don't have fans.

Re:I've had a fanless video card for years!

[Stephen Williams]

News to me, because mine certainly does. It's a cheapy InnoVision one.

-Stephen

Re:I've had a fanless video card for years!

[Winckle]

OMG, until recently I had the exact same card, and let me assure the GParent poster it does have a fan, a little dinky one, but a fan none the less. I just gave it to my little sister, because her old rage card wouldn't put out xp in anything more than 256 colours.

Re:I've had a fanless video card for years!

[zr-rifle]

sorry then, my bad.
but really, does a geforce 2 mx really need a fan? absurd!

Depressing...

[Brain_Recall]

This is simply a depressing review of a unique product (in the sense it's ASUS's first attempt at a silence card cooler). The 6600GT is only compared to the new 7800GT (guess who wins?). There are no attempts at comparing the system to anyone elses silent cooling system (or active systems, for that matter). The whole review gives the feel that this is ExtremeTech's first 6600 to fall upon them.

What really bothers me, though, is they give no tempreature readings whatsoever. How much does the CPU temp go up with the radiator above the heatsink fan, or to the side? What are the temps on the card, with and without active cooling? Would you need to upgrade your CPU heatsink/fan to keep the processor from overheating?

They totally glossed over the shinning parts of the card and stamped out another reviewtisment.

Re:Umm.. they all used to be

[jonfelder]

slow + no fan != innovation
fast + no fan == innovation

So.

[Cyno01]

My All In Wonder 9800Pro is fanless. I installed one of these on it.

Since when did they need fans?

[doublem]

When did Graphics cards start needing fans to the point where one WIHTOUT a fan is news?

The graphics card in my PC, Linux Laptop and Work Laptop are all devoid of fans. There's the case fans, the CPU fans but that's it.

Has it really been that long since I upgraded my PC? Funny how not buying new games all the time reduces my desire to upgrade my computer.

I remember attaching the CPU fan from an old Pentium to my ATI card a while back just for the fun of it, but I didn't leave it there.

What gives? What am I missing?

What in the heck are you DOING with those graphics cards that you need a fan????

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[DrunkenTerror]

Playing games made this millenium?

I buy about 1 game a year, but my last 4 or 5 video cards, stretching back to that old Kyro VR, have had fans.

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[doublem]

Playing games made this millenium?

Hmmm, let's see.

Nerthack.

Freedom Force.

X-Com

Quake II and Quake III

Half Life

Civ III

Sim City 3000 Unlimited

Frozen Bubble.

Serious Sam

Diablo II

I tried Doom 3, and while it ran just fine, the gameplay left me cold. It just wasn't as fun as the games listed above.

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[clem]

Nerthack.

Have you played the Mac version call "iNertHack".

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[Joe the Lesser]

Try something more intense, like a mmorpg. If my fan isn't running during EQ2 or FFXI, the graphics card overheats and shuts down the PC.

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[theantipop]

What fanless video card do you own that can play Doom3 just fine? And are we talking 'just fine' as in 400x300 with no textures? But to answer your question, you really are out of the game when it comes to PC upgrades. Every mainstream card I can think of since the Voodoo 3 had fans. There have been many fanless versions along the way, but every single one I have seen gets released with a fan.

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[DrunkenTerror]

I was merely answering your question. That's what I'm doing to need a fan on my video card, playing new games. If you find PC gaming on an old video card fun, then more power to you. Old games are great. I'm working my way though the NES catalog these days, myself, but I also like new games too. Why are you so incredulous about the hardware cycle? When desktop processors that needed active cooling first hit the scene, did you shun them? "What the hell are you DOING that needs a 32bit processor that runs so hot it'll melt if you don't put a fan on it?"

I mean, shit, 640k outta be enough for everyone, and there was a global market for 5 computers once. Come on, dude. You're in IT. You know about hardware cycles. Why the shock?

BTW, I checked you list, and only Civ 3 (4Q `01}, Freedom Force (1Q `02), and Serious Sam (1Q 01) were actually released during this third millennium of Christ.

In closing, I only foed you because of you beggar signature, nothing personal. Since you're a suit in IT can't you just like, uh, BUY yourself a Mac Mini? I know, I know! The glaring hypocrisy of you spamming slashdot and you encouraging people to harass a SPAMmmer on your /. user blurb is just a subtle attempt at humor.

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[doublem]

I know, I know! The glaring hypocrisy of you spamming slashdot and you encouraging people to harass a SPAMmmer on your /. user blurb is just a subtle attempt at humor.

No, I'm just a cheap, self centered bastard.

I wasn't really incredulous about the GPU fans, I was trying to play the "Old Coot" card, and really screwed up on my attempt to convey humor on-line.

And yes, I'm aware of how old the games in question are. That was my point. I don't play many new games, which is probably the reason my GPU doesn't have a fan.

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[doublem]

GeForce FX Go 5200 in my work laptop.

800x600 with textures and dynamic lighting.

I don't remember the FPS, but I didn't notice any lag or flicker issues either. From a performance stand point, I found it very playable, it just wasn't my cut of tea.

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[doublem]

EQ2

Evercrack 2......

No, I'd better not. I already have enough things competing for the time when I should be sleeping.

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[Jon-o]

I found it a little slow with my 5200 (fanless), but only a tiny bit. Definitely playable, though I'd want to turn the resolution down if I was playing a lot, or doing a bunch of multiplayer craziness.

The big question is why you would need anything so expensive for a "home theatre" setup. I mean, my old TNT2 card would already be overkill for that kind of setup, and it was just as silent and probably used less power than the 5200. It doesn't have to *do* much beyond stretching the video to fit the frame. Of course, if you want to display it on a TV with no pretty inputs, you might want a card with a tv out, but that's still no reason to use a high-powered GPU.

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[mabinogi]

No - every over priced, early adoptor "Ultimate", "eXtreme" top of the line card in the last few years has had a fan, but the mid-range to budget versions are quite often fanless, and will play pretty much every game available at the time of its release at perfectly acceptable resolutions, and usually with most features turned on.

Quite a lot of people don't see the tradeoff in price and noise as being worth a few minor graphical improvements.

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[iwan-nl]

The big question is why you would need anything so expensive for a "home theatre" setup.

From TFA:

But you don't want to sacrifice too much performance. There are a number of passively cooled Geforce 6200 based cards, for example, but they can't handle high-definition video decoding well.

So apparenty you'd need a fast GPU to decode HD video.

Re:Since when did they need fans?

[skryche]

I remember attaching the CPU fan from an old Pentium to my ATI card a while back just for the fun of it, but I didn't leave it there.

I want to party with this guy!

Noise

[RealityMogul]

I'll take the time to worry about my practically inaudible video card fan once I achieve the following:

1.) Install remotely activated spike strips in road for when kids go screaming through at 70mph or have the bass turned up way too loud in their car.
2.) Aquire a directional EMP generator so I can take out the neighbors stereo when she does yard work.
3.) Systematically replace every lawn in the neighborhood with artificial turf so I never have to hear a lawnmower again.
4.) Get rid of girlfriend.

Why is this interesting?

[Ryan Amos]

I guess I can see the appeal of a fanless graphics card, but not in a home theater. In a home theater you rarely need any sort of high res 3d capabilities, so most people opt for onboard video. If you need DVI for your $4000 LCD TV you can just buy a cheap GeForce/Radeon or whatever with DVI at Fry's for under $50.

If you want games, get an X-Box or PS2. I find PC games really hard to play on a TV with a keyboard anyway.

Case compatibility probs

[amigabill]

Pity it won't fit in some HTPC cases such as Antec Overture or AHANIX MCE601B-A that this nor the GIGABYTE GV-N66T128D I tried will fit in. The folded up heatsink on this guy, and the heatpipe arwpping from front to back on the Gigabyte card I tried go up above the card far enough to prevent the case lids from fitting, as the lids go only a very small distance above the rear case bracket screw and the heatsink/heatpipe go a good bit higher than that...

I'd love a fanless card for my MythTV box, but it seems that's not meant to be...

Benchmarks

[Prien715]

What's the rationale for comparing a 6600 to a 7800? Of *course* it's going to be slower.

Why not compare it to a vanilla 6600 and see if it performs any differently since there's quite a bit of benchmarks available for vanilla version?

If they perform exactly the same (what I'd expect), then we're just asking if noise difference is worth the price difference. Instead, they do gratuitous benchmarks. What a waste.

Re:Benchmarks

[yeremein]

Why do benchmarks at all? The 6600 and 6600GT have been benchmarked to death already. Unless this 6600GT performs substantially differently from standard ones, there's no reason to benchmark anything at all. ...Except maybe some temperature measurements to see how effective that radiator thingy is at keeping the GPU cool. What was the article about again?

Help me in my inexperience

[YoungHack]

I totally don't game, so I have never researched video cards with that in mind. However, I have been interested in fanless video cards (with good Linux drivers). In my browsing, I looked a lot at the Jaton 3DForce Fx-5200LE (http://db.jaton.com/VGAProductDetail.aspx?P_ID=84 228L-T128MAO).

What would I be giving up? Efficient playing of video? Just 3D gaming? Just curious.

How does anyone keep all of this stuff straight?

My card is faster and quieter!

[Derf_X]

I have a Radeon 7200 with no fan. A higher number means it's faster, right? And I got it for free more than a year ago. Ha!

Journalistic Integrity

[xgamer04]

I realize Slashdot isn't really a "news organization" with "real" journalists and such, but seriously. If the guy submitting the article is from the site that is linked, at least put a blurb like Someguy (of pcwhatever.com) writes "(summary)". It looks more like a real news entry rather than a shameless plug.

Isn't it a bit of overkill for home theaters?

[MerlinTheWizard]

Since the author mentions that. I use a cheap FX5200 for my "home theater" PC, the video output is great and it doesn't have any fan, just a small heatsink. And it's cheap as hell. Why use stuff too powerful for the job at hand? Not only is this a waste of money, but usually a big waste of electricity as well...

As for other uses: not sure I see the point. This card is not really powerful enough for professional intensive graphics work, and gamers usually don't care much about the noise, since the game itself usually makes a lot of noises and sounds...

Re:Isn't it a bit of overkill for home theaters?

[un1xl0ser]

Mod parrent up.

When you run your HTPC/PVR a lot, you don't want a card that will play the latest and greatest games ... you want one that will display what you need to, has video out and does NOT suck up a lot of power.

Insane

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had 3 ASUS geForce cards blow up due to overheating WHILE THEIR FANS WERE FUNCTIONING FINE. It's the reason I switched to ATI video cards. So far no blown ATIs. You'd have to be a fucking sucker to buy this card.

Wrong.

[imsabbel]

It doesnt eleminate _a_ fan in a multifan enviroment, it eleminates the smallerst, highest RPM, loudest and easieast to clog up with dirt and fail fan in a multifan enviroment.

10 12cm case fans running at 7V dont come close to some of those 8000rpm 40mm fuckers

No, I read it much worse

[DumbSwede]

I read it as: A Fanless Graphic Card for the Anus Yes, you don't want a lot of spinning when it's in there.

Moving Parts suck.

[Trillan]

I've never had a video card die any kind of death other than the fan breaking. On my ATI RAGE Fury, the fan just stopped turninig. On my nVidia Ti 4600, one of the blades broke off and the fan wobbled itself to death. On my ATI 9800 Pro, the fan seized to the point that I couldn't even turn it with my finger.

Re:Moving Parts suck.

[toddestan]

I've found the small fans on video cards to be extremely unreliable. To make matters worse, getting the fans off of some cards can be a real challenge. I've had several fans die. On a ATI 8500 I managed to get a chipset fan to work on the card. On a GeForce2, I epoxied an on Pentium Pro heatsink (minus fan) onto the video card. Works fine, though I lost 2 PCI slots by doing it.

Re:Moving Parts suck.

[Trillan]

Fanless video cards aren't just for those who want silence. They're also for people who want their computer to still be alive when they come home from a weekend away.

The Radeon 9800 is in for repairs, the nVidia was just fried, and the Fury was okay but too old when it died to be worth bothering with.

I haven't got a good success ratio. Sometimes you catch it in time to do some heroics, but often you don't. We need more fanless systems (or, I guess more reliable fans).

Re:Moving Parts suck.

[BenjyD]

I've had the same experience. Graphics card fans seem to get noisier over time as well. I think it's something to do with the fact that in most tower cases the card fan is upside down - I've had fans that made horrendous noise when installed but ran fine when turned back the 'right' way round.

I just replaced my fan with a heatsink

[Michael Woodhams]

Here's the heatsink. The manufacturer has several similar products.

But I only have a Radeon 9200. (It does just great on Railroad Tycoon II and Master of Orion II. I think my AMD-64 3000+ may be overkill however.)

Re:isn't call of duty 2 using 512mb graphics cards

[KillShill]

the sky must be falling.

new games using more than 256MB's of ram? say it aint so.

short-sighted users are never wrong!!

Silencer who?

[msbsod]

"Silencer" reminds me of the trouble I had with an ASUS V8460 Ultra Deluxe. Pretty expensive graphics adapter when I bought it. It produced lots of interfering noise on the screen. So did the replacement from ASUS. This was not driver related, since the trouble already showed up during the startup phase of the BIOS. No way to fix it. I don't know how many different motherboards and power supplies I tried. Not the cheapos, you know. I even checked things like the voltages of the power supplies. Anyway, at that time ASUS was running a BBS system where people complained about their trouble with this hardware. Eventually ASUS played "silencer" and closed the whole BBS. There are still enough reports from other people with similar trouble on the web. I am wondering if ASUS is going to silence those sites, too.

Hello?!

[imsabbel]

One hint:
ffdshow doesnt use the gpu for videa decoding AT ALL. And scalling if _free_ since 5 generations ago. Even a gforce 2 can scale 100fps to the maximum resolution the ramdac supports without _any_ problems.

Maybe you should upgrade your _CPU_ if you want to decode HD-quality compressed video...

I'm a huge fan

[db10]

.. of fanless graphics cards. I have one of those heatpipe jobbers on my ancient 9800, oldschool!

not really new

[lactose99]

so's mine, what's the story?

also see Aopen low profile passively cooled 6600

[enrico_suave]

Aopen Aeolus PCX6600 Passively Cooled Nvidia Geforce review

Product PAge for Aopen Aeolus pcx6600

That heat sink is huge! if you needed something low profile and didn't need the "GT" an option to consider...

e.

Ok, everybody jokes....

[Belial6]

Ok, everybody jokes about using a P4 as a heater. I am here to say that for the last two weekend, I did in fact use a P4 as a heater. I am remodling my home, and have removed all of the sheetrock and insulation from the Living Room/Dining Room/Kitchen. The Dining Room is where the only wall heater in the house is located. This means that running it would be useless. All of the heat would just go up through the attic, and out the vents. So, I closed the door on the bedroom, and ran my P4 3.2ghz laptap through the night. It doesn't compare to a real live heater, but it was enough to keep me comfortable.

I've got a Gigabyte fanless 6800...

[Rob Simpson]

With all 16 pipelines unlocked, and it's great. I also have a fanless Antec Phantom PSU and a huge thermalright heatsink with a 120mm fan (at minimum speed on a Zalman fanmate) over my CPU, all in an Antec 3700BQE (noise-reducing) case. Incredibly quiet yet very fast, though I've been thinking of upgrading to a dual-core CPU.

It would be nice to see an article about, say, products available to reduce computer noise, rather than what amounts to an advertisement for a specific product...

6645 Gigabyte OEM

[Hoonis]

I'm browsing on a completely silent heatpipe 6600 (6645 OEM from Gigabyte to lidl, a Eurpoean bundler).

What can I say? It's silent. Completely. All I hear is the Disk seek.

These are very easy to find (google|froogle GeForce 6600)...

Re:Overkill? - not for HDTV outputs

[amigabill]

Look around for cards with HDTV outputs. Now, which ones have good Linux support? (Honestly, I have no idea if ATI's component converter works in Linux) I think the NVidia based cards might support DVI HDTV connections as well as component, is this true?

Couple major issues with this thing

[Anonymous Coward]

First it's going to make your CPU hotter because your CPU fan sucks the got air off your GPU and blows it right onto your hot CPU.

Second, this article sucks because no where does he say what the card temps are. Does this fanless heatsink even work?!

This card is *not usable*!!

[Hurricane78]

I have a very silent system here. My 500 PSU uses two 19db fans and barely gets away its own heat. it also heatens the case a bit.
then the rest of my system is cooled by a water cycle and a convector cooler that is nearly the size of one of my case's side plates.
additionally i have a 12" fan on a radiator that should only run when my pc gets too hot for the convector.
And guess what: It runs non-stop.

Why? Because my old Radeom 9800XT that runs with a two-sided cooler and still has 67C right now while i'm writing this, and goes up to 72-75C in games like doom 3.

The conclusion is: You CAN'T cool a high-end-pc really silently!

I thought about taking a second convecor for the other side. But this would not double the cooling but only add some percents to it because of the cubic relationship of the cooling surface and the difference between air-temperature and water-temperature.

Now my case as a whole gets so hot from everything, that I can't even touch the hard disks without nearly burning my fingers. (7200rpm raid)

So the only solution for completely silent coolness is something like a real refrigerator with a real compressor, or alternatively some really huge convector in a cold room, beause i don't even need a radiator for heating the room: My pc heats it even when it's less than 0C outside.

If only i could put all this lost power in processing capacity... :(

Lossless processors anyone...??

also consider the Gigabyte GeForce 6800 AGP

[Qrlx]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16814125142

Roughly the same performace, more if you unlock the pipes/shaders. Passive cooling. AGP.

Or use a big fan

[mparaz]

Or use a big fan like the Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 5 (Rev 2) (review with pics) with "Direct Heat Exhaust System" (DHES):

The DHES draws cool air from inside the case and exhausts warm air outwards. This prevents the fan from recycling warm air to cool the GPU, which increases cooling performance. Further the DHES lowers the air temperature inside the case, because the heat of the GPU will be carried out directly.

Really overexpensive!

[msormune]

Just buy a low end Radeon like 9250 or something similar. Very cheap, very small. They have no fan and yet keep pretty cool, and 2d picture quality is pretty good. Yes the 3d performance is abysmal, buy who cares. Please don't comment me about the state of ATI drivers for Linux, I pretty much know the situation there...

Gigabyte has done one really greate long ago

[Nicolas Pillot]

Gigabyte has done one really greate long ago : gv-n68128dh, which is also fanless, and for which it is almost all the time possible to re-activate the disabled pipes. Card's review to be found here. Way better than this 6600 i think !

ATI Radeon 9600

[evilandi]

The ATI Radeon 9600 is also available fanless (in the SE and vanilla range it ships fanless; some reports of success replacing the Pro's fan with a Zalman heatsink); I have a vanilla 9600 and it runs Half Life 2 and Far Cry quite happily on my 2GHz Athlon 2400XP with an impressive feature-set (not maximum, but stuff like grass turned on) at 1024 res. It just has an old-style heatsink.

GamePC had a feature on fanless graphics cards about 18 months ago.

Compare to fanless Gigabyte 6800

[pyite69]

I have been using the Gigabyte 6800 fanless for a few weeks now (replaced a jet engine sounding 6600GT). I don't notice much difference in performance (I mostly play WoW at 1280x720).

What's the big deal?

[ChrisPaget]

"There are a number of passively cooled Geforce 6200 based cards, for example, but they can't handle high-definition video decoding well".

Sorry, but that's a bunch of bollocks. I've been playing DVDs just fince since they came out in the UK (mid-1998 - when I bought my DVD drive I bought a copy of every single DVD they had in the shops at the time - a total of about 8). I started out with a separate decoder card which was fanless, and played DVDs just fine. They're now trying to tell us that we need to shell out on this because the almost-latest-and-greatest nVidia card can't do DVD decoding? Bullshit.

People, if you want a quiet system just buy an older card. eBay is a great place to pick up an older (fanless) geforce card, and with the speed of a modern CPU (which will HAVE to have a fan on it) you can make up for in software what the decoder on the card lacks in hardware.

Failing that, just put your computer in a cupboard behind the speakers. How quiet do you really need it to be?

Re:What's the big deal?

[ebrandsberg]

You need to look at the quote you quoted: "High-definition". DVD's are NOT high-def. That said, I'm happy with my $99 (per prices 2 years ago) ATI 9600 SE that was passive at the time.

What is this bull?

[default luser]

It has a poor reference card heatsink and heatsink attachment design, the heatsink likes to break its seal with the die on the GPU making the card overheat and lockup.

So did the 9800 Pro. So has EVERY midrange card. It comes with the pricepoint: manufacturers are trying to pack as much performance as they can into the cheapest card they can, because the midrange typically has the worst profit ratio. Some manufacturers cut corners on design, and you end up with cheaply-applied epoxy that breaks loose. Next time don't buy the CHEAPEST card.

But you know what? There are TONS of manufacturers who offer NON-REFERENCE HEATSINKS these days preinstalled for a little more money...like, for one instance, the card featured in this article.

The memory bandwidth is insufficient, the 6600GT has a 128-bit memory bus and a 1000MHZ memory clock. Consequently, there is not enough memory bandwidth to turn on antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.

You would THINK this if you were nothing but a spec whore. But if you actually looked at performance comparisons in games, the latest ATI 6600 GT killer (the x800 GT) actually has NO BETTER PERFORMANCE WITH AF / AA, even though it sports TWICE the memory bandwidth of the 6600 GT.

Did it ever occurr to you that AA actually takes additional GPU passes, in addition to the extra memory bandwidth? Did it ever occurr to you that higher memory bandwidth on cards that can't utilize it is a great but worthless selling point, just like putting 256MB ram on a 6200? The 6600 GT and x800 GT suck at 4x AA at higher resolutions because they lack the GPU horsepower.

But both are perfectly capable of providing a reasonable balance of AA / AF. With my 6600 GT, I ran HL2 at 1280x960 with 2xAA and 8xAF, or 1024x768 with 4xAA and 8xAF. As for multiplayer, where I need more fps, I run CS: Source at 1152x864, 2xAA, 8xAF, and Battlefield 2 at 1024x768, 2xAA. Both play over 60fps for me, even in heavy matches. This is not bad for a year-old card.

As for HDR, it's really only usable by the 7800 series. Even the 6800 GT and Ultra choke on it. But that's no surprise, really...most new features aren't that great the first time out (T&L on GeForce 256, for example).

I also forget to mention the wretched Vertex Shader performance of the 6600GT even when only Vertex Shader 2.0 is used

Again, we get back to the "usefulness" versus "selling point" argument. ATI has 6 vertex shaders on all their parts (even the ones that can't make use of them, except in unrealistic benchmarks), but the 6600 GT was specifically designed with three because it doesn't need more to fill those pipelines.

I'll bet you didn't know that the 6600 series actually only has 4 pixel rendering pipelines. The other 4 pipes are only put to work doing multi-pass rendering techniques, which is a given for all games released since 1999. You have probably not noticed this because it doesn't harm real-world gaming performance at all.

YES, the 6600 GT is a midrange card. NO, it can't perform like a high-end card. But YES, it is VERY competitive. Stop bashing it like it's some six-fingered man who killed you father.

WHOEVER IS ATTACKING MY BLOG, I DID NOT SAY THAT!

[ClioCJS]

THE ABOVE COMMENT WAS *NOT* BY ME.

Slashdot doesn't add your signature to anonymous posts.

Someone else put my signature on the anonymous comment.

You, the attacker, are being manipulated into attacking me even though I did not make the anti-linux comments.

So please.. re-vector your attack at the true perpetrators.
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