Fanless mid-range HDMI cards unveiled

MORE GPU GOODIES in the mass of unlabeled chaos that is Computex day -1. This time we come to the pretty ones, and in the interest of fairness, we are showing two NVidia based cards and two ATI, picked solely because I thought they were neat on some level, or the drugs were wearing off at just the right time.

The NV front is brought up by the Gigabyte board on the bottom. The name is obscured by the plastic, but it looks to be a 7600 of one kind or another. The thing that I like about it is the way they manage arflow in this fanless card. The front and back copper heatsinks are pretty normal, but the aluminum one at the edge of the bracket is not, and looks to suck a few watts out of the system when the air is exhausted. Nice trick.

The other card is a MSI 7300, and the unobscured label reads 'NX7300GT', a high spec low end card. The thing I like about it is the shiny cutout on the bog-standard heatsink. If MSI ever picks names for their cards, this one should be either 'emo blaster' or 'angry goth'.

Imagine little Timmy coming home to a UPS box waiting at the door. He opens up and discovers that instead of a 7600, he got a 7300! Teh horr0r, teh shock! Now all he does all day is sit at home, tears washing aways his thick black mascara. He can't draw well, but boy does he draw a lot of spiders. If only mommy had gotten an MSI 'angry goth' for him, he would not have wasted the paper, and his life!

Moving along to ATI, we can't take the first one seriously either. If MSI/NVidia can have an Emo Blaster, GeCube can have a butterfly on their heatsink. In fact, the GC-HP1600XTG3-E3 lets you do that on a fairly decent card for gaming, if you like gaming with the Sims, alone, in the dark. 'Vicious Laser Bee' might be more appropriate.

Last up, we have another fanless card, the GeCube X1600 HDMI PCIe Series. This one is neat for real, again with the mid-range 1600 chip, but topped off with a huge heatsink and no fan. The neat factor is that it has an HDMI output. For all your DRM wishes, HDMI is ready, waiting and quiet.

Those are the first wave of GPUs out there, shiny and oddly shaped. Some do things everyone should, others do things that no one should. Some are pretty, some are, umm, gothy, and the butterfly one will probably not be seen withing 100 yards of a lan party until it has real lasers coming from it's eyes.µ