When you pick up a mid-range graphics card that's clocked at 560MHz - 10MHz faster than a GeForce 7800 GTX 512 - with its memory running at 700MHz (1.4GHz effective) - quicker than said 7800 GTX 512's RAM - you'd be right to expect a fan powerful enough and noisy enough not only to wake the dead, but blow them right back to the grave. With that in mind, the cooling on the Asus EN7600GT Silent is a breath of fresh air.
The EN7600GT Silent has a chunky passively cooled HSF that's similar to the version Asus implemented on its earlier EN7800GT TOP Silent. The HSF has a radiator arm that has to be rotated upwards and away from the body of the card to allow the integrated heatpipes to function. However, the EN7600GT's version is superior to its predecessor, as there's now a heatsink on both sides of the card. The cooler is broader too, so when deployed, the arm is further away from the motherboard and far less likely to get tangled up with your CPU cooler.
Unlike the older EN78000GT TOP Silent, the EN7600GT Silent isn't overclocked. The high clock speeds mentioned earlier are the defaults for the GeForce 7600 GT. It's a 90nm GPU, so it runs cooler than its mid-range 7800-series predecessors, and it doesn't use much power either. With the card installed, our test PC drew just 196W while running 3DMark06, which is less power than it consumes with an ancient Radeon 9800 Pro installed.
The GeForce 7600 GT is a pretty powerful GPU, with a neatly balanced design of 12 pixel processors and 12 texture processors, matched by eight ROPs, and backed up by 256MB of memory. Performance-wise, as with the GeForce 6600 GT, Nvidia has pitched the 7600 GT at people who want to play games at 1,280 x 1,024. Need for Speed: Most Wanted isn't too bad at this resolution with high anti-aliasing and high anisotropic filtering, but it really flies if you reduce the filtering levels.
In F.E.A.R., the EN7600GT won't provide smooth frame rates at 1,280 x 960 with AA and AF engaged. Overclocking will slightly increase these frame rates, but you'll still see the card falter in fierce firefights. That said, F.E.A.R. isn't kind to any 6-series graphics card, even high-end models, so the EN7600GT isn't doing too badly to make the game playable at 1,024 x 768 with all of the detail settings up high.
In Quake 4, the EN7600GT was fine at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA, which is once again a great achievement for a mid-range card. We also put the EN7600GT through its paces in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend. Although we haven't yet developed a benchmark for the game, the EN7600GT averaged close to 30fps at 1,280 x 1,024 in the first level, with the demanding 'next generation content' option turned on, although without AA enabled.
As the EN7600GT is passively cooled, overclocking requires more than the usual amount of care. While the passive cooler is very effective, the lack of a fan means that the heat it puts out isn't going anywhere, so you need your case fans to do the work. Our test rig is housed in a Cooler Master Centurion 530 fitted with two stock Cooler Master 120mm fans at the front and rear, and we were able to stably overclock the EN7600GT's core to 600MHz, and its memory to 800MHz (1.6GHz effective). This core speed is 80MHz slower than that achieved by the air-cooled 7600 GT in our tests, but it gave F.E.A.R. a 10 per cent boost, which is very welcome.
CONCLUSION
The closest rival to the GeForce 7600 GT in terms of price is ATi's new Radeon X1800GTO, and the two cards are undoubtedly extremely close. Indeed, fanboys are going to be driven virtually rabid by these two cards, as they both enable you to play games at the same settings. Only in Quake 4, an OpenGL game that favours Nvidia's GPUs, is there any hint of a real difference. However, when it comes to noise, the EN7600GT is certainly far easier on the ears than the Radeon X1800GTO. Its neat passive heatsink increases the cost, but we're convinced that £20 or so is well worth paying for total silence from a graphics card.
Author: Phil Hartup
Asus EN7600GT Silent