ASUS cards blow odd and cool

TWO NEW GRAPHICS cards stood out at the ASUS booth, not the latest and greatest, but innovative engineering on a Radeon 1300 and a NVidia 6600. Strangely enough, as is the case nowadays, they both involve cooling.

The one that jumps out at you is the Radeon 1300PRO/Silent, a very different fanless cooler. You would not intuitively think that two heat sinks at 90 degrees to each other can be effective at cooling, but they are doing it, so there must be some merit. It is much more effective at catching your eye, take a look, there is nothing else like it out there.

Next up is the extremely odd ASUS EN6600 TOP SILENT, this card is backwards. Look at the pictures, everything is mounted on the 'wrong' side of the board for added cooling. Truly weird. They claim no noise, and it should be because there is no fan, 30 degrees cooler, and 40% faster than a normal GF6600. If those claims hold up, it is a big win.

ASUS is not afraid to put the engineering effort in to make a really different and standout card. They are also not afraid to make a really odd looking card if it works better. We need more thinking like this, the generic rebadging of reference designs is getting old. µ