Building on its long history of developing the world's most renowned passively-cooled graphics cards, Gigabyte has launched the Gigabyte Radeon HD5770 Silent Cell GPU, which targets consumers looking for a truly silent graphics card for use in environments such as home theatres.
“While the passive heatsink does add some size and weight to the card, it also keeps it cooler than some fansink solutions,” says Niel Campbell - Gigabyte Product Manager at Rectron, sole local Gigabyte distributor.
He believes there are very few silently/passively cooled cards on the market, and even fewer good ones, and says Gigabyte's solution offers the best possible cooling thanks to the large copper base of the cooler and four heatpipes, ensuring heat moves away from the major components.
“This card uses the unique design of the cooler, along with natural convection from the airflow inside a chassis to draw in cool air over the fins. It also uses Gigabyte's Ultra Durable VGA - with two-ounce copper PCB board, Tier 1 memory, Japanese solid capacitors, ferrite core chokes, and low RDS (on) MOSFET5 and high quality components - to further reduce the heat output of the card and improve the flow of electricity through the board.”
Compared with traditional graphics accelerators, Gigabyte says its Ultra Durable VGA graphics accelerators can lower GPU temperature by between 5% and 20%, decrease power switching loss by 10% to 30%, and increase overclocking capability by between 10% and 30%.
According to Campbell, the Gigabyte Radeon HD5770 Silent Cell GPU, available today at a suggested retail price of between R1 999 and R2 199, offers “excellent performance” for most applications.
He also points out that while it may not match the ultra high-speed benefits of its far more expensive high-end counterparts, it offers a good balance, with lower power consumption and the added benefit of the silent cooling solution.
“Because of its passive cooling activity, this card is targeted at mainstream gamers looking for a good balance of performance and features,” he explained.
Silent, high-quality home theatre implementations
“But the main market that will benefit from this card is the home theatre PC market, since the card is whisper-quiet and offers excellent display output options with HDMI and DisplayPort for full HD output.”
The DisplayPort interface can support higher resolutions, richer colour depth, and increase refresh rate performance, delivering 10.8Gbps of bandwidth over previous generations of connectivity options such as DVI, LVDS and VGA.
With DisplayPort connectivity on the Radeon HD5770 Silent Cell GPU, PC gamers can play all the latest games on their large-screen home theatre displays, which Campbell maintains provides an audio and visual experience unmatched by any of today's console gaming systems.
Campbell again warns that the cooler does make the card a little too large for very small HT PC cases, but argues that users who trade up to a slightly larger case will discover the benefits of the enhanced display outputs and possibility of big screen gaming, thanks to the performance offered by the Radeon HD5770 Silent Cell GPU.
“Some may find the size of the cooler daunting, but the trade-off in performance and connectivity more than makes up for the size of the cooler,” he adds.
“Users get a card that runs much cooler and quieter than its fan-cooled counterparts with the advantage of being able to put together a set-up that offers the latest connectivity with silent performance.”
Technical specifications
The Gigabyte Radeon HD5770 is built on the ATI Radeon HD 5770 Series GPU, which uses the 826 million transistors on 40nm fabrication process and GDDR5 memory and is equipped with Microsoft DirectX11, ATI Eyefinity Technology, ATI Stream technology, ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support, UVD 2 and PowerPlay.
As discussed, the Gigabyte Radeon HD5770 is specifically targeted at home theatre enthusiasts, and its Gigabyte Silent-cell cooling design with four high-performance heat pipes and two additional fins increase surface area for better cooling and heat dissipation, and are connected to the ultra-huge copper base plate. By adopting an ultra-huge pure copper base with four heat pipes, heat spreads effectively from hot areas.
Furthermore, two additional fins increase 52.87% surface area to dissipate the GPU temperature.
The Gigabyte GV-R577SL-1GD features ATI's latest second-generation TeraScale graphics engine, which provides power performance levels of more than two teraFLOPS, with 800 stream processors respectively.
With 1GB GDDR5 memory, the GV-R577SL-1GD provides twice the data per pin of GDDR3 memory at the same clock speeds. Using ATI Eyefinity Technology, every gamer can run up to three displays from a single graphics board and expand the field of view across all displays.
Gamers can enjoy the ultimate gaming experience with innovative “wrap around” multi-display capabilities with ATI Eyefinity Technology. Furthermore, ATI Stream Technology allows users to benefit from the massive parallel processing power of GPU for physics, artificial intelligence, stream computing and ray tracing calculations, and tackle demanding tasks like video transcoding.
In addition, the Gigabyte Radeon HD5770 supports Microsoft DirectX 11 for full 3D visual effects and dynamic interactivity with DirectX 11 support, including features like tessellation, HDR texture compression, multi-threading and DirectCompute.
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