Gigabyte Radeon X800 (GV-RX80256D)

Gigabyte seems to be making a push to be a favorite video card vendor among people who want a silent PC, like those with a home theater PC or those who have spent a lot of extra money on other quiet components. Both are very good reasons to get a video card that is as silent as possible. Noise from a cooler always comes from the fan, so the best way to make a cooler quiet is by making it fanless. Gigabyte has done this with their Silent-Pipe technology. Essentially, it is a heat pipe design that pulls heat away from the graphics chip and transfers it to the back of the board. This makes it a completely silent video card.

Many people might think that only low-end chips can be cooled without a fan, since high-end chips usually run at higher frequencies, making them run hotter. However, Gigabyte's design has allowed them to use the Silent-Pipe on the lower tier high-end chips from both ATI and NVIDIA. A while ago, I reviewed the company's AGP GeForce 6800 featuring the Silent-Pipe, and it has worked well ever since then, not ever getting overheated. Today, we are going to switch interfaces to PCI Express and chips to the ATI Radeon X800 to take a look at Gigabyte's GV-RX80256D. Beyond sporting the X800 chip and a PCI Express interface, this video card features 256 megabytes of GDDR3 memory on a 256-bit bus, a core clocked at 400 MHz, and memory clocked at 490 MHz (980 MHz DDR). This puts the core clock at stock speed, but the memory clock is considerably bump up from ATI's stock 350 MHz. This means the memory clock is in the territory of X800 Pro, XL, and XT boards, but the standard X800 (and Pro) has only 12 parallel pipelines, whereas the X800 XL and XT have 16. Regardless, Gigabyte has delivered another solid-performing, silent video card to the highly-competitive graphics card market. Read on to find out how this card stacks up against a GeForce 6600 GT and 6800 GT.