Silent 7600GS in a Shuttle case

[steckman]

My brother has a Shuttle case and I am thinking of upgrading him to a silent 7600GS from ASUS or Gigabyte. He isn't a heavy gamer (Civ IV and Rome Total War at the moment), but he would appreciate the silent card. I just wanted to get your opinion on two points:
1) He currently has a 6600GT. From what I've see, it looks like the performance improvement going from that to a 7600GS is pretty small, although the additional 128MB of texture memory would certainly help in some situations. Has anyone here moved from a 6600GT to a 7600GS?
2) Since the silent cards don't have a fan, I assume they rely heavily on good airflow. The Shuttle cases use that heatpipe system to draw air away from the PC, but I don't know if that leaves much airflow for the rest of the case when the cover is on. Anybody have any experience with a fanless video card in a Shuttle case?

 

[cleeve]

A 7600 GS won't offer much of a performance boost over a 6600 GT. If he needed a silent card, there are nice 7600 GTs out there... he'd see a performance difference with one of those.

All silent cards do rely on case air movement though, if the shuttle works on a heat-pipe system you may find the GPU & case heating up unnaceptably...

 

[steckman]

Yeah, I would certainly go for the silent 7600GT, but I haven't seen a single-slot one (he is using the one other slot). Plus, all of the dual slot ones have the second slot on the wrong side for a Shuttle case anyway.

I'm tempted to try the 7600GS and see if the airflow is sufficient, I just wanted to post on here first and see if anyone had tried that already. If I do go that route, I'll certainly post the results.

 

[firepyro555]

It depends on which shuttle system you have, some have extra fans in teh back (only 40's) to help circulate air, where as the one that my friend has really has no fan and relys on the heat pipes to transfer heat from the CPU. With a silent card you need to be careful, i've known many with silent cards that have fried uber fast because the heat sinks were inadaquate. Also with the shuttle, there is no air flow, and thats a fact, unless you have a newer system

 

[jap0nes]

man... i've seen somewhere a 7600GS clocked to GT speeds, passively cooled as far as i remember. Performance was pretty close, but i cant remember about pricing.
And there's the heat problem.

If i find the article i'll post

that's it:

http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/347/

but it's not passively cooled... my bad

 

[steckman]

My brother has the G5 chassis which really has limited airflow, so I'm somewhat skeptical. But I'm going to forge ahead with the experiment anyway. The silent 7600 should arrive today, so we'll see if he can cook it over the weekend. At least he doesn't do any overclocking ... although his Celeron D 2.66GHz seems to put out more heat than I would have expected.

 

[firepyro555]

Yeah, just watch the temps really carefully, and if he doesn't have cats or dogs, and if the case is elevated off a carpet, run the computer with out the side and top so that you can increase airflow, it might not be totally great for the computer to leave it open, but it will help keep things just alittle bit cooler.

 

[steckman]

The video card was running at about 53 degree when I put it in, and about 63 degrees after playing some Rome: Total War. I'm going to download 3dMark06 and put the computer through a few iterations and see what that does to it.
As far as running with the case off, I really doubt my brother would want to do that. Also, I seem to remember reading on Shuttle's site that running with the case off actually decreases airflow because of how their chassis is designed. I guess they have some kind of wind tunnel effect.

 

[steckman]

Well, the video card temp never got over 63, so I guess everything is fine. So no worries with silent video cards and Shuttle cases. Thanks everyone!