An unfortunate side effect of many of today's high-performing PC peripherals is significant heat output. The need to tame this heat has led to bigger, and unfortunately, louder cooling solutions, which is something we at HotHardware are very familiar with. With the number of fans we have in some of our test systems, you'd think we were trying to keep the fires of hell at bay. Our intentions aren't that heroic though, we're just after the same thing most of you probably are; a decent computer. Without any background noise, even a system that could be considered "mid-range" by today's standards can be quite loud. The quest for more exotic, quiet, and more efficient cooling solutions has certainly delivered some interesting designs.
Today, we'll be looking at ASUS' Extreme N6600GT Silencer, which is a silently cooled "mid-range" video card. One of the more popular cooler designs of today, is to have the hot air exhausted out of the back of the case through an additional PCI slot opening. This dual-slot design is far more efficient at dispersing heat than the use of a giant heat sink without a fan to remove heat. Not exhausting the heated air generated by a video card has a cascading effect on the rest of your hardware, which results in increased temperatures for every component. However, with a passively cooled video card, your system will certainly be quieter. Which is what this card is designed to do.
When testing the ASUS Extreme N6600GT Silencer, we'll be emulating a few various case configurations. A case with 3 fans, the same case with no fans, and even an open air test-bench (no case) will be tested as well. Game and cooling performance comes later. But first let's have a look at NVIDIA's GeForce 6600GT specifications.
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| NVIDIA's 6600 GT Architecture |
| A plethora of features |
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CINEFX 3.0 SHADING ARCHITECTURE
- Vertex Shaders
Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
Displacement mapping
Geometry Instancing
Infinite length vertex programs*
- Pixel Shaders
Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
Full pixel branching support
Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
Infinite length pixel programs*
- Next-Generation Texture Engine
Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
Support for non-power of two textures
Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
DirectX and S3TC texture compression
- Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes
64-BIT TEXTURE FILTERING AND BLENDING
- Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
- Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
- Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
- Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions
INTELLISAMPLE 3.0 TECHNOLOGY
- Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering
- Blistering-fast anti-aliasing and compression performance
- New rotated-grid anti-aliasing removes jagged edges for incredible edge quality
- Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
- Fast z-clear
- High-resolution compression technology (HCT) increases performance at higher resolutions through advances in compression technology
ULTRASHADOW II TECHNOLOGY
- Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games, like id Softwares Doom III
ADVANCED ENGINEERING
- Designed for PCI Express x16
- Supports for AGP 8X including Fast Writes and sideband addressing
- Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory
- 128-bit advanced memory interface
- 0.11 micron process technology
- Advanced thermal management and thermal monitoring
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ADVANCED VIDEO AND DISPLAY FUNCTIONALITY
- Dedicated on-chip video processor
- MPEG video encode and decode
- WMV9 decode acceleration
- Advanced adaptive de-interlacing
- High-quality video scaling and filtering
- DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions
- Dual integrated 400 MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz.
- Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
- Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
- Full NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability
NVIDIA DIGITAL VIBRANCE CONTROL (DVC) 3.0
- DVC color controls
- DVC image sharpening controls
OPERATING SYSTEMS
- Windows XP
- Windows ME
- Windows 2000
- Windows 9X
- Macintosh OS, including OS X
- Linux
API SUPPORT
- Complete DirectX support, including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX 9.0
- Full OpenGL, including OpenGL 1.5
* The operating system or APIs can impose limits, but the hardware does not limit shader program length.
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