Silent-GPU Roundup

Zitat

To give a brief summary of performance, we have the ASUS EN7800 GT Top Silent as the obvious leader followed by the Gigabyte 7600 GT in second place. Depending on the game, the next best card in terms of performance is either one of the Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA, and ASUS 7600 GS cards or either of the ASUS and Gigabyte X1600 XT offerings/ The factory-overclocked Gigabyte 7600 GS scores slightly better than the rest of these, making it the overall third fastest silent card. The next step down would be the ASUS EN6600 GT Silencer, followed by the Gigabyte and Albatron factory-overclocked 7300 GTs. Depending on the game and settings, the HIS and Gigabyte X1600 Pro might do a little better or worse than the reference-clocked MSI NX7300 GT (better generally in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Rise of Legends, and worse in most of the other games). Then at the low end you have the HIS and Gigabyte X1300 Pro followed by the Gigabyte 7300 GS. Again in Splinter Cell and Rise of Legends, the Gigabyte X1300 performs slightly better than the Sparkle 7300 GS Ultra 2, and in most of the other games the Sparkle 7300 GS performs the worst.

In terms of Overclocking, the MSI 7300 GT and the Gigabyte X1300 stood out with high core and memory overclocks (135MHz core clock increase in the MSI 7300 GT, and 160MHz core and 55MHz memory clock increase for the Gigabyte X1300) resulting in large performance increases in Oblivion and Battlefield 2 for these cards. The Gigabyte 7600 GS, in spite of already having a 50MHz core overclock, managed to go up nearly 100MHz on the core clock which was an impressive feat for this card. The Albatron 7300 GT is another factory-overclocked card that got a particularly high core and memory overclock: 102MHz higher in the core and 84MHz in the memory clock. The Gigabyte X1600 Pro got a decent 80MHz increase in the core clock and the HIS version of the same card got an even better 97MHz increase in the core. These were some of the examples that stood out when overclocking these silent GPUs.