GeCube ATI X700Pro Silent as a snowy night

THE SMALL FANS that adorn modern graphics cards and struggle to keep them cool are often noisy little things. GeCube's answer to fan noise is simple, but drastic: get rid of the fan. As a result, the company's Radeon X700PRO SilenCool (aka the RX700XTG) appears to be the highest-performance totally silent graphics card on the market today.

I tested a version of the PCIe format card with 128MB of GDDR3 memory. It's based around the RV410 core, with 8 pipelines and a 128 bit memory bus. The street price is currently around $230. Full specifications are here, at GeCube's site, here.

The X700PRO SilenCool uses two large heatsinks, one on each face of the card, to get rid of heat. A pair of thick heatpipes loop over the top of the card to carry heat from the front heatsink, which covers the graphics and memory chips, to the back heatsink. The back heatsink doesn't actually touch the card, and soft pads ensure it stays that way. On a normal ATX motherboard, the back heatsink will be fairly close to the CPU, so it gets some benefit from the CPU cooling fan.

The heatpipes, by the way, make the card too high to fit in many small form factor cases (see here for an example). There should be no problems with larger cases, including full-height MicroATX, however. GeCube also make a smaller, fanless ATI X600XT card, which should go where the X700PRO cannot.

As the benchmarks below attest, GeCube have done a pretty good job of producing a powerful mid-range graphics card without the normal noise penalty.

3DMark05	1024 x 768
GeCube RX700XTG	2835
Albatron PC6600U	2361
3DMark03	1024 x 768
GeCube RX700XTG	7280
Albatron PC6600U	6046
Doom 3 (Demo 1)	800x600	1024x768	1280x1024
GeCube RX700XTG	48.3 FPS	37.7 FPS	25.3 FPS
Albatron PC6600U	not tested	55.3 FPS	40.0 FPS
Notes: No AA, No AF, Max Detail
Half Life 2 (HardwareOC - Coast)	800×600	1024×768	1280x1024	1600x1200
GeCube RX700XTG	77.4 FPS	76.4 FPS	74.1 FPS	62.5 FPS
Albatron PC6600U	not tested	73.9 FPS	68.8 FPS	not tested
Notes: Trilinear Filtering, No AA, Max Quality
Half Life 2 (HardwareOC - d3c171)	800×600	1024×768	1280x1024
GeCube RX700XTG	69.2 FPS	65.1 FPS	51.6 FPS
Albatron PC6600U	not tested	57.9 FPS	45.5 FPS
Notes: Trilinear Filtering, No AA, Max Quality
Half Life 2 (HardwareOC - Coast)	800×600	1024×768	1280x1024
GeCube RX700XTG	74.4 FPS	63.0 FPS	39.4 FPS
Albatron PC6600U	not tested	60.6 FPS	40.3 FPS
Notes: 4xAA, 8xAF, Max Quality
Half Life 2 (HardwareOC - d3c171)	800×600	1024×768	1280x1024
GeCube RX700XTG	57.3 FPS	42.5 FPS	27.6 FPS
Albatron PC6600U	not tested	40.4 FPS	24.2 FPS
Notes: 4xAA, 8xAF, Max Quality

All benchmarks were run on an Asus P5GDC-V Deluxe motherboard, with a 3.4 Ghz Pentium 4E, and 2x512MB Kingmax DDR-II 533. I used Bench'emAll 2.64 and HardwareOC Half Life 2 Benchmark 1.3 to coordinate the testing. Unless otherwise stated, I used default hardware and software settings, and the most recent drivers available from ATI and Nvidia.

Overclocking a fanless graphics card would be foolish. So of course, I had to give it a try. Surprisingly enough, the card does have a bit of headroom for overclocking (which augurs well for its continued stability when running at stock speed in poorly ventilated cases). ATITool was able to push the core speed up from 425 Mhz to 465 Mhz, and the memory speed from 432 to 470 Mhz. This 10 percent increase in clock speed fittingly earned an increase of 10 percent in the 3DMark05 score.

I measured the temperature under the top edge of the front heatsink (the ambient temperature was 18°C). When the card was idle (displaying the Windows desktop), it hovered around 50° C, under load (playing Half Life 2), the temperature crept up towards 65° C. However, overclocking quickly raised the temperature to over 70° C - I assume the real core temperature was considerably higher. So don't buy this card to overclock.

This heat output demonstrates that the RX700 really is approaching the limits of what's possible with passive cooling. When I last spoke with GeCube, they were doubtful about the possibility of using the same fanless cooling technology on more powerful, but hotter, graphics chips, like the ATI X800 (Although there are some aftermarket coolers that attempt to do this). So with graphics cards steaming past the 100 watt boundary, makers of quiet VGA cards are going to have to find some other way to cool them down.

And, in fact, informed rumour has it that ATI is looking at mounting a complete liquid cooling module - containing a reservoir, pump, and radiator - onto graphics cards for low-noise cooling of future high-performance graphics chips. µ