Cards Summary and Prices
In total, we have 20 silent GPUs for this review, and this is a large number of cards to keep track of. With that in mind, we have a breakdown of the cards and their prices in this section. Some of the cards are older generation and we don't have prices for them at this time; specifically, the ASUS EN6600 GT Silencer and the ASUS EN7800 GT Top Silent. These two cards have been around for a while and while rare, it is still possible to find them floating around on the market if you know where to look.
Here are the cards and prices:
As sometimes happens, some of these cards couldn't be found for sale at the time of this writing (marked with a *), but we still listed a rough idea of what kind of prices we expect them to carry. Keep in mind that these are all silent cards, so prices for a non-silent version of the same card may be very different. This is because it may be more efficient and therefore less costly to design and manufacture a card without any moving parts. On the other hand, with a card like the ASUS EN7800 GT Top Silent, the silent version is likely to be more expensive than its standard competitors, given the radical heat sink design required to keep the card running cool.
While we couldn't find any Gigabyte 7300 GTs available for purchase at the time of this writing, you should expect to pay around $140 or more for this part, depending on the vendor, availability, etc. This is a bit more than a standard clocked 7300 GT like MSI's, but the performance increase we will see from Gigabyte's factory overclock on this card puts it more in competition with the 7600 GS than the 7300 GT.
The Albatron 7300 GT also appears to be unavailable for purchase at this time, but we speculate that it should cost about the same or slightly less than the Gigabyte 7300 GT, given that their factory overclocks are similar. While there is a 50MHz difference in core clock speeds between these two cards, the difference in performance between them will be fairly close (depending on the game and settings) as we will see in the performance section.
We aren't sure about cards like the Sparkle 7300 GS Ultra 2, HIS X1600 Pro and Gigabyte X1600 XT, so we listed a price range that reflects a number of cards of the same type that are available by other manufacturers. There is a lot of overlap here of course, and we can't know for sure what these cards will sell for (or even when/if they will be available for purchase), but we can make some price suggestions for these cards based on their performance and the prices that we have for our other silent cards in this review. The Sparkle 7300 GS Ultra 2 for instance would be a good value closer to the same price as the Gigabyte 7300 GS, given the similarity in performance: probably about $45-$50. The HIS X1600 Pro would be a decent buy at around $95-$100, and the Gigabyte X1600 XT should probably list for around $140-$150, given current prices for this ATI part.
In general, the prices for all of these cards -- with the exception of the older ASUS 7800 GT and 6600 GT -- will range from about $50 to $170 which puts them in the mid-range and budget categories. Higher performance cards generate more heat, and as we mentioned, slower cards are better suited for silent operation. That is why we don't see many fast cards like the 7800 GT and above that are completely silent. As technology improves and cards become more efficient, we will surely see silent cards with much higher performance capabilities, particularly if there continues to be demand for silent solutions.
In total, we have 20 silent GPUs for this review, and this is a large number of cards to keep track of. With that in mind, we have a breakdown of the cards and their prices in this section. Some of the cards are older generation and we don't have prices for them at this time; specifically, the ASUS EN6600 GT Silencer and the ASUS EN7800 GT Top Silent. These two cards have been around for a while and while rare, it is still possible to find them floating around on the market if you know where to look.
Here are the cards and prices:
| Graphics Card Prices | |
| ASUS NVIDIA GeForce EN7800 GT Top Silent | $399* |
| ASUS NVIDIA GeForce EN7600 GS Silent 512 | $138 |
| ASUS NVIDIA GeForce EN7600 GS Silent | $129 |
| ASUS NVIDIA GeForce EN6600 GT Silencer | $178* |
| ASUS ATI Radeon EAX1600 XT Silent | $156 |
| GIGABYTE NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT | $167 |
| GIGABYTE NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS | $110 |
| GIGABYTE NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT | $100-$140* |
| GIGABYTE NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS | $55 |
| GIGABYTE ATI Radeon X1600 PRO | $95 |
| GIGABYTE ATI Radeon X1600 XT | $110-$170* |
| GIGABYTE ATI Radeon X1300 PRO | $73 |
| GIGABYTE ATI Radeon X1300 | $52 |
| EVGA NVIDIA e-GeForce 7600 GS | $117 |
| SPARKLE NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS Ultra 2 | $40-$115* |
| ALBATRON NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT | $90-$140* |
| HIS ATI Radeon X1600 PRO | $95-$110* |
| HIS ATI Radeon X1300 PRO | $98 |
| MSI NVIDIA GeForce NX7600 GS | $115 |
| MSI NVIDIA GeForce NX7300 GT | $77 |
As sometimes happens, some of these cards couldn't be found for sale at the time of this writing (marked with a *), but we still listed a rough idea of what kind of prices we expect them to carry. Keep in mind that these are all silent cards, so prices for a non-silent version of the same card may be very different. This is because it may be more efficient and therefore less costly to design and manufacture a card without any moving parts. On the other hand, with a card like the ASUS EN7800 GT Top Silent, the silent version is likely to be more expensive than its standard competitors, given the radical heat sink design required to keep the card running cool.
While we couldn't find any Gigabyte 7300 GTs available for purchase at the time of this writing, you should expect to pay around $140 or more for this part, depending on the vendor, availability, etc. This is a bit more than a standard clocked 7300 GT like MSI's, but the performance increase we will see from Gigabyte's factory overclock on this card puts it more in competition with the 7600 GS than the 7300 GT.
The Albatron 7300 GT also appears to be unavailable for purchase at this time, but we speculate that it should cost about the same or slightly less than the Gigabyte 7300 GT, given that their factory overclocks are similar. While there is a 50MHz difference in core clock speeds between these two cards, the difference in performance between them will be fairly close (depending on the game and settings) as we will see in the performance section.
We aren't sure about cards like the Sparkle 7300 GS Ultra 2, HIS X1600 Pro and Gigabyte X1600 XT, so we listed a price range that reflects a number of cards of the same type that are available by other manufacturers. There is a lot of overlap here of course, and we can't know for sure what these cards will sell for (or even when/if they will be available for purchase), but we can make some price suggestions for these cards based on their performance and the prices that we have for our other silent cards in this review. The Sparkle 7300 GS Ultra 2 for instance would be a good value closer to the same price as the Gigabyte 7300 GS, given the similarity in performance: probably about $45-$50. The HIS X1600 Pro would be a decent buy at around $95-$100, and the Gigabyte X1600 XT should probably list for around $140-$150, given current prices for this ATI part.
In general, the prices for all of these cards -- with the exception of the older ASUS 7800 GT and 6600 GT -- will range from about $50 to $170 which puts them in the mid-range and budget categories. Higher performance cards generate more heat, and as we mentioned, slower cards are better suited for silent operation. That is why we don't see many fast cards like the 7800 GT and above that are completely silent. As technology improves and cards become more efficient, we will surely see silent cards with much higher performance capabilities, particularly if there continues to be demand for silent solutions.
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Josh Venning - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
I also forgot to mention that some people use their pcs in home theater systems as well. This would be another case when you want as little noise from your computer as possible.imaheadcase - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
That was not always the case, my 9700 Pro i still use when fan went out a year ago, works like a charm without it on. It was in its time the high end card, lets hope those days come buy again :Deckre - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
What a great review, when tom did their silent VC review, they included a grand total of three cards...pfft. nice job anand.I have the 7600GT, very sweet and 0dB is oh so nice.
Josh Venning - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
We just wanted to say thanks all for your comments and we are still trying to make sure we've caught any errors. (there are actually only 20 cards in the roundup and not 21) As Derek said, these cards were included in the article because we requested any and all silent cards that any of the manufacturers were willing to give us to review. That's also why we have more cards from ASUS and Gigabyte than the others.Olaf van der Spek - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
Because the videocard industry hasn't introduced such a bad design as the netburst architecture.
epsilonparadox - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
No they've introduced worse. When they recommend a second PS just for grafx or even a 1Kw single PS, they've taken intel's lack of thermal control to a whole new level.DerekWilson - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
graphics cards use much much less power in 2d mode than in 3d mode -- and even their 3d power saving capabilities are really good.this is especially true when you consider the ammount of processing power a GPU delivers compared to a CPU.
Theoretical peak performance of a current desktop CPU is in the 10-15 GFLOPS range at best. For a GPU, theoretical peak performance is at least one order of magnitude larger reaching up over 200 GFLOPS in high end cases.
I'm not saying we can reach these theoretical peak rates on either a CPU or a GPU, but a GPU is doing much much more work under load than a CPU possibly could.
Keep in mind we aren't even up to GHz on GPU cores. On the CPU front, Intel just shortened the pipeline and decreased clock speeds to save power -- doing more work in one cycle. This is absolutely what a GPU does.
And the icing on the cake is the sheer options on the silent GPU front. Neither AMD nor Intel make a fast desktop CPU that can be (easily) passively cooled. These parts are a testiment to the efficiency of the GPU.
On the flip side, ATI and NVIDIA push their high end parts way up in clock speed and power consumption trying as hard as possible to gain the performance crown.
There are plenty of reasons GPUs draw more power than a CPU under load, but a lack of thermal control or inefficient desing is not one of them. It's about die size, transistor count, and total ammount of work being done.
JarredWalton - Saturday, September 2, 2006 - link
I disagree with Derek, at least in some regards. The budget and midrange GPUs generally do a good job at throttling down power requirements in 2D mode. The high-end parts fail miserably in my experience. Sure, they consume a lot less power than they do in 3D mode, but all you have to do is look at the difference between using a Radeon Mobility X1400 and a GeForce Go 7800 in the Dell laptops to http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=276...">see the difference in battery life.In 2D mode, graphics chips still consume a ton of power relatively speaking -- probably a lot of that going to the memory as well. A lot of this can be blamed on transistor counts and die size, but I certainly think that NVIDIA and ATI could reduce power more. The problem right now is that power use is a secondary consideration, and ATI and NVIDIA both need to have a paradigm shift similar to what Intel had with the Pentium M. If they could put a lot of resources into designing a fast but much less power-hungry GPU, I'm sure they could cut power draw quite a bit in both idle and load situations.
That's really the crux of the problem though: resources. Neither company has anywhere near the resources that AMD has, let alone the resources that Intel has. Process technology is at least a year behind Intel if not more, chip layouts are mostly computer generated as opposed to being tweaked manually (I think), and none of the companies have really started at square one trying to create a power efficient design; that always seems to be tacked on after-the-fact.
GPUs definitely do a lot of work, although GFLOPS is a terrible measure performance. The highly parallel nature of 3D rendering does allow you to scale performance very easily, but power requirements also scale almost linearly with performance when using the same architecture. It would be nice to see some balance between performance scaling and power requirements... I am gravely concerned about what Windows Vista is going to do for battery life on laptops, at least if you enable the Aero Glass interface. Faster switching to low-power states (for both memory and GPU) ought to be high on the list for next-generation GPUs.
DaveLessnau - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
I'm wondering why Anandtech tested Asus' EN7800 GT card instead of their EN7600 GT. That card would be more in line with Gigabyte's 7600 GT version and, I believe, is more available than the 7800 version. In the near future, I'd like to buy one of these silent 7600GTs and was hoping this review would help. Oh, well.DerekWilson - Thursday, August 31, 2006 - link
you can get a really good idea of how it would perform by looking at Gigabyte's card.as I mentioned elsewhere in the comments, we requested all the silent cards manufacturers could provide. if we don't have it, it is likely because they were unable to get us the card in time for inclusion in this review.