ASUS EN7800GT Silent Video Card Review :: ASUS EN7800GT Silent

The first thing that comes to mind when looking at the card is where's the fan my man? The card has no fan on the front of the card, making it an excellent fit for those wanting a video card to work in a relatively silent computer. The front of the PCB has a heat sink which covers the graphics chip and the memory chips. ASUS decided to outfit the card with a heat pipe which can be turned in a case to a position most favorable to cooling the card.

Side view

Logo on card

Heat Pipe top view

Rear of GPU

Top view of card

ASUS equipped the card with 8 32MB 1.6ns memory chips. This memory is rated for 600MHz operation. ASUS further overclocks the memory by 20MHz over the rated speed, giving the card almost 40GB of memory bandwidth. NVIDIA's reference 7800GT has a memory bandwidth of around 32GB/second and the ASUS card has a massive clock difference of 120MHz over the reference card. The rear of the card has a PCI Express connector to give extra power for the overclock.

PCI Express power

PCI Express

Capacitors

Rear of card

A big selling point of NVIDIA cards over the last two years has been SLI technology. Due to the positioning of the heat pipe over the top of the 7800GT Silent card, the optimal placement would make SLI a physical improbability. The heat pipe is designed to draw the heat away from the card, so two of these cards would be impossible to cool effectively in an optimal position.

Front view

I/O

SLI Connector

Sticker

Input and Output devices on the card are typical for a high-end video card today. There are two DVI-I ports and a TV-out ports on the side bracket. This allows the end-user to use two LCD monitors, a LCD+CRT monitor, or two CRT monitors with the included adapters. The card can also be attached to a television or HDTV to play computer games on the TV.