Most graphics cards tend to contain two
different types of cooling: active, meaning fans, and passive, meaning a heat-sink
and heat-pipes. The former may be more effective, but fans also use more power
and can produce a lot of noise, particularly when they get going. Silent
graphics cards tend to rely entirely on the latter: instead of a fan and heatsink
combination, you get nothing but a massive heatsink.
The benefit of this is immediately obvious no
moving parts means no additional noise but there are disadvantages too, so
before you buy a silent graphics card make sure you're aware of them.
Overclocking, for example, is difficult to do when you don't have active
cooling - heatsinks don't cool as well as a fan does, so you'll struggle to
squeeze much more capacity out of it. For the same reason, if you stress your
card a lot it'll be more likely to fail without a fan, just because its average
running temperature is likely to be higher.
The
benefit of this is immediately obvious no moving parts means no additional
noise but there are disadvantages too, so before you buy a silent graphics card
make sure you're aware of them.
Still, if keeping the noise down is more
important to you than anything else, passively-cooled graphics cards will still
let you play games that look better and run faster than on an integrated GPU,
and best of all, you don't have to pay much more than the equivalent
active-cooled variety.
For each review, we've noted the price, the
amount of memory, the card's release date and the chip architecture used, so
that you can compare it to other, similar cards. Where possible, we've also
tried to note a near, non-silent equivalent so that you know how well it
performs in real-world tests.
Asus GeForce EN210
Although originally made available in
October 2009, the GeForce 210 has been hanging on by its fingertips as a budget
card for some time. Here, Asus has doubled the amount of RAM seen in the
reference design, bumped it up from DDR2 to DDR3 and priced it incredibly
affordably. Despite all this effort, though, it's still not much to write home
about.
The thing to note about the GeForce 210 is
that its performance is no better than the vast majority of integrated GPUs on
the market. If you have anything with Intel HD Graphics 2000 or better (i.e.
any Sandy Bridge chip, or any AMD APU) then your system is already
outperforming it. In fact, if you have an Intel Core CPU that's Clarkedale or
better, installing this card won't be an upgrade so much as a sideways-grade.
That makes it an incredibly hard sell for even the most aging systems.
Asus
GeForce EN210
It is, at least, low-profile and silent,
with a single-slot design, so you're not going to encounter much trouble
fitting it into a media PC or other low-power system (performance might be an
issue if you're trying to play HD video). You get a DVI port, an HDMI port and
a VGA port, which gives it reasonable compatibility, particularly with the
older systems it's aimed at.
The truth, though, is that even at $39 it's
overpriced. It's understandable why - any less and it wouldn't be worth selling
it at all but paying twice the price gets you far more than twice the card.
Even with Asus' tweaks to the reference
design it's a graphics card that's old, tired, and completely unable to compete
with the capabilities offered by modern systems. If you do find that your
integrated GPU is unable to keep up with modern computing, it should beef
things up such that you can use an operating system, view webpages and watch
the BBC iPlayer but any expectations higher than that will remain utterly
unmet.
Details
·
Price: $39
·
Architecture: 40nm
·
Memory: 1GB DDR3
KFA2 GeForce GT 610
The model number beginning with a '6' might
make you think that the GeForce GT 610 is a 28nm Kepler card but the truth is
that they're just 5-series Fermi cards re-released under a later numbering
system. Sneaky. The GeForce GT 610 is actually a re-packaged GeForce GT 520 with
some slight improvements, although none worth mentioning.
Still, that does mean that for less than $62,
you can get a silent graphics card that performs about as well as Intel's HD
Graphics 4000. It certainly shows up the likes of the GeForce 210, which costs
ten pounds less and performs substantially less well. This card can handle HD
video without complaining, for a start.
IO ports include one VGA, one DVI and one
HDMI, so there's a good range of technologies supported from the recent to the
very old. Support for technologies like Blu-ray 3D mean it's probably going to
be best for home theatre systems, where you'd rather keep the fan noise to a
minimum, but its single-slot low profile design means it's also small enough
and capable enough to power an office PC or low-power system.
KFA2
GeForce GT 610
Interestingly, there's a 2GB version of the
card which shouldn't prove too hard to find for as little as $62, but don't get
tempted unless you know you'll use that much memory - in a card this weak, 2GB
of memory isn't likely to find much use in things like games. So paying for
extra RAM isn't going to show an obvious increase in capabilities unless you
know where and how to look.
Once again, though, it faces the problem
that many low-end hardware choices do: it's overpriced for what it can do. Not
as horrendously as the GeForce 210, admittedly, but still to the point where a
few extra pounds will get you something much better. That said, if you're
buying in quantities where those pounds will stack up, at least you can be
confident that this card does the bare minimum something that can't be said of
all hardware.
Details
·
Price: $54
·
Architecture: Fermi (40nm)
·
Memory: 1GB DDR3
