ATI Buyer's Guide, Part III: All Graphics Cards!

Asus EAX X1600 XT Silent

What sets the Silent version apart from other X1600 XT cards is its passive cooling solution. Instead of using a fan, the heat is conveyed away from the GPU to a large heatsink on the back of the card, with the help of heatpipes. This makes for cramped space at the back of the card, though, and on some motherboards the cooler may actually be uncomfortably close to - or even flush with - the Northbridge heatsink. The memory modules are not cooled at all.

ATI's Radeon X1600 XT supports Pixel Shader 3 and HDR rendering coupled with antialiasing. The chip's overall performance is a good third lower than that of the Radeon X1800 XL, meaning it is just this side of adequate for complex 3D games.

Asus's EAX X1600 XT Silent sports a VGA connector as well as a DVI output. It also features a video-output connector.