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ASUS EN8600GT Silent 256MB GDDR3 (GeForce 8600 GT)

By Vincent Chang - 13 Jul 2007

The ASUS EN8600GT Silent

The ASUS EN8600GT Silent

Passive coolers using heat pipes are a dime a dozen nowadays and ASUS' design on this silent GeForce 8600 GT is not exactly revolutionary. A copper faceplate is in direct contact with the relatively small G84 core, with a copper heat pipe transferring heat to the larger aluminum heatsink. This heatsink has many solid and rather thick fins to increase the surface area for heat dissipation and not the thin flimsy fins that you'll find on some coolers. Finally a plastic shroud covers the latter half of the heatsink near the rear of the card, helping to focus any internal air flows in the chassis so that they pass through the fins and exit the chassis through the vents behind. In short, it seems like a rather conventional two-slot passive cooler.

The bright yellow plastic shroud over part of the heatsink is too garish for our taste, though it does serve a purpose of focusing the flow of air through the exit vents behind.

The DDR3 memory chips are left alone without any cooling aid, relying on the ambient environment to cool them, though that should be easily done since the ASUS is clocked at the standard 1400MHz DDR. The core too is at the default clock of 540MHz, making the task of cooling it less arduous for the heatsink. ASUS has also decided not to follow the trend of having only solid capacitors for this board and there are only a couple of these higher quality capacitors onboard.

A single copper heat pipe transfers heat from the core to the solid looking aluminum heatsink. As you can see, this card uses 1.4ns memory chips from Samsung, which while typical of the GeForce 8600 GT, does limit its overclocking.

Besides that, ASUS has added HDCP support for this GeForce 8600 GT, which is not a compulsory feature for this SKU. Useful if you intend to watch protected high definition videos on your system in the future and complements the new PureVideo processing engine on the G84 core. Since this is a GeForce 8600 GT, the two DVI outputs are dual-link variants.

Not all GeForce 8600 GT cards come with HDCP support but ASUS has included that feature for this silent edition. Naturally, it's all factored into the cost of this product so if you feel you won't be needing that, you can save some by choosing another model.

This being a mid-range graphics card, the applications and accessories given are not as plentiful as more expensive cards. Although ASUS includes a leather wallet for CDs, there are only two CDs in the bundle and no third party games or applications are found. Instead, proprietary ASUS applications like its Gamer OSD (allows users to change the brightness, contrast and gamma values within a PC game or application without exiting the current program) and GameFace Messenger (allows users to communicate visually, voice over and text chat with friends and companions while playing the same game together) are added to bolster this bundle. The complete list of items we found are as listed below:

  • 1 x DVI-to-VGA adaptor
  • 1 x 9-pin mini-DIN to Component dongle
  • User Manual (CD format)
  • Utilities and Driver CD
  • Leather CD wallet
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