BIOS: Technology Means Business

With the season of goodwill approaching fast, we all hope for a peaceful Christmas. ASUS’ Extreme AX800 Silencer graphics card brings zero noise to your desktop PC system thanks to a large passive heatsink in place of noisy fans. Based on ATI’s mid-range X800 GPU, the EAX800 Silencer has a distinctive look about it, with a 90-degree cooler mounted on an adjustable swinging bracket which is designed to put the heat into the path of air flow in your case.

Possibly the ultimate Radeon X800 variant, the EAX800 Silencer (£136 ex. VAT) boasts 256MB of dedicated onboard memory, dual DVI connectors, as well as video in/out ports. However, its most impressive feature is that it makes absolutely no noise when running. The implementation of heatpipe technology into the computer market has allowed air-cooling to improve in many ways. Given how efficient this technology is at moving heat it has allowed manufacturers to develop quieter cooling solutions. It has now even reached a stage where these cooling solutions create absolutely no noise.

Technical specifications of the EAX800 Silencer include 256MB of DDR3 memory, 392MHz engine clock (8MHz slower than the standard specification in order to reduce heat), 700MHz memory clock, and 400MHz RAMDAC. The card features 12 pixel pipelines, but it does utilise a 256-bit memory bus allowing for a memory bandwidth in excess of 20GB/s. This all means a Radeon X800-based model costs only slightly more than an nVidia GeForce 6600 GT, yet offers better performance running the majority of games.

The card uses a 16-lane PCI Express bus, offers a maximum output resolution of 2048x1536 pixels, and supports video-in & video-out (VIVO) with HDTV support. The bundled breakout box has full video-in and video-out capability with composite and S-Video, but there’s no audio in/output. You may also want to bear in mind that the card offers digital video outputs only - there’s no VGA output.

The idea behind the SilentCool heatsink is that the CPU HSF unit pulls air through the radiator unit to cool the VPU. The airflow created by the CPU HSF would certainly be enough to cool the V/GPU. This scheme has some obvious drawbacks, namely that you are pulling heated air into the CPU HSF. However, the argument could be made that whether you pumped it directly onto the CPU or not - a passive heatsink will dump it into the case and would eventually make its way into the CPU HSF.

The heat is transferred through a heatpipe structure that is attached to the base of the heatsink by the VPU and connects to the radiator. The radiator itself has about 50 thin copper pins. The front of the heatsink is a large aluminium plate with the usual fin. The heatsink itself is mounted using two locking nuts with springs and then two more screws and a back bracket. A unique joint design rotates the copper fins 90-degrees away from critical components on your motherboard, although you’ll need a large case with plenty of space in order to install the card.

ASUS bundles some excellent software with the card including its own PowerDirector 3DE and Medi@Show SE 2.0, and a full version of Eidos’ Project Snowblind and Xpand Rally. GameReplay records gaming action into MPEG-4 video files so that LAN teams can review all the moves and tactics to improve for the next tournament. The recorded files can also be used as screen savers or posted on blogs. Just like people who share their lives and thoughts on blogs, expert gamers often want to show off their perfectly executed strategies and five-hit combinations. GameLiveShow is created to allow gamers to stream broadcast their gaming experiences live over the Internet. Other players can now go online to check out how the experts really do it.

Built into the driver of ASUS graphics cards, Splendid detects activation and usage of video applications and automatically optimises image quality for the best visual results. Splendid further provides five modes for best visual results in different video applications (Standard, Game, Theater, Scenery and Night).

With a compatible CPU HSF the AX800 is a perfect choice for somebody looking for a silent mid-range video card for a gaming PC. And with the included quality software bundle, it’s hard to go wrong. It performs very well, and you can even wring another 5- 7 per cent from the card by overclocking. With absolutely no active fans the Extreme AX800 Silencer reached a stress temperature of just 68 degrees in our tests, with an idle temperature of 48 degrees. However, with just a slight hint of air-flow the stress temperature dropped to just 44 degrees. Having said that, the X800 GT core limits how much it can do without significant overclocking, but as a mid-range card, it performs top of its class. [7.5]