ASUS has been starting to show more and more interest in silent graphics with completely passive cooling and now that it launches ASUS EN7600GS TOP SILENT/HTD/512M it is one of most ambitious designs up to date. ASUS hasn’t held back when trying to make the cooling as efficient as possible. It has namely turned the the whole card upside down, putting the graphics circuit and the memory chips on the upside instead (imagine the card installed in a standing computer chassis). This means that the graphics card cooler can take advantage of the processor cooler’s fan and air flow for optimal cooling.
“Besides providing larger heat exchange area, the extended heatsink takes on a clamshell design, which enables users to open up the heatsink, like a clamshell phone, for enhanced ventilation. By leveraging the CPU fan, the all-new ASUS graphics card is fan-less and operates at 0dB for quiet computing.”
We’ve earlier seen picture of a GeForce 6600-based graphics card by ASUS using this design, but now the first commercial product has appeared and it uses the more powerful 7600GS circuit. The graphics card comes with 512MB DDR2 memory and will offer up to 25% better performance than NVIDIA’s reference card. The graphics circuit is clocked at 550MHz while the memory works at 950MHz DDR. The card should arrive in stores sometime the coming week and be priced at about $160.
