HIS HD 4650 iSilence 4 512MB

CONCLUSION

There is a lot to like with the HIS HD 4650 iSilence 4 512MB. As with other HIS-products we reviewed, it feels like a high quality card. The Zalman cooler can be bought separately, but that means you have to strip your current card from the fan, risking damaging it. It feels a lot safer to just buy the card with the cooler pre-installed. The cooler itself performs very well and still manages to keep the temperatures down to accetable levels with lots of room to spare. The card costs around ~89$ (Newegg) which makes it slightly more expensive than a regular HD4650 card, but we feel it is well worth the money if you want a totally silent card.

The gaming performance of the card is adequate and we actually were a bit surprised that it did performs as well as it did in Far Cry 2, a brand new game. This means that the card certainly can be used for gaming as long as you turn down the quality levels a bit.

Last but not least, the card excels in media playback. The HD3650 was the card of choice for many HTPC's last year and we are quite certain that the HD4650 will be as popular. With its passive cooling solution, the HIS HD 4650 iSilence 4 512MB is even more suited for an HTPC.

Pros:

+  Runs cool
+  Decent gaming performance for its price
+  Completely silent
+  Low price
+  Excellent HTPC capabilities

Cons:

-  Not suited for heavy gaming
-  No bundle to speak of
-  Even though it is cheap it costs about ~20$ more than a regular HD4650
 

HIS HD 4650 iSilence 4 512MB will receive a score of 8.0 (very good) out of 10.