The nVIDIA 7600GT has been almost universally praised as one of the best mid-ranged video cards out there right now, and a very worthy successor to the fantastic 6600GT, a solution that to this day refuses to die. One of the criticisms levelled against it however is a rather noisy stock cooler, which considering its relatively low heat output, seemed rather a shame. Asus has fortunately released a variant that not only reduces noise, but eliminates it all together. Enter the EN7600GT Silent.
As you can see from the image above, the EN7600GT’s cooler is nothing short on huge, and features no fans whatsoever. Asus has achieved this by moving the heat from the core to two large heat sinks, one on the back side of the card, and another larger heat sink that either runs adjacent to the plane of the PCB, or perpendicular to it depending on your setup. This heat is moved via heat pipes, and the fact that both heat sinks are warm to the touch is proof that the heat is being transferred very effectively. Asus recommends that you have the movable heatsink positioned in the upright position unless it is being used as a secondary card for SLI mode. The card will then benefit from additional airflow being provided by the CPU cooler.
Aside from this innovative cooling solution, the 7600GT follows the reference card to a tee, with 256MB of memory, a dual-DVI interface and a 12 pipeline core running at 560MHz and the GDDR3 memory running at 1.4GHz DDR (700MHz). The card also features 8 pixel output engines and five vertex shaders. This is exactly the same clock speeds as Asus’s non-silent variant so the passive cooler comes without penalty.
Bundle
As we saw in our recent Asus X1900XTX review, Asus sure knows how to put together a mean bundle, and this card is no exception. Inside the coffin-sized box you will find an installation guide, an HDTV cable, two DVI-VGA adaptors, two full games, namely King Kong and Expand Rally, an Asus installation disk (which comes with some very useful Asus-exclusive software) and a very attractive leatherette CD wallet. As you would expect, the card’s box is emblazoned with King Kong’s face in order to maximise their film tie-in deal. The PC version of King Kong is remarkably similar to the acclaimed Xbox 360 version, so if you are a fan of the big Ape, a full version of this game should be reason enough to purchase this card over competing solutions alone.
