Asus EAH6770 DC SL/2DI/1GD5 graphics card

For most people, the idea of building a silent or near-silent PC with a passively cooled graphics card (no cooling fans) means saying goodbye to any notion of playing today's games in reasonable frame rates. After all, most of the passive cards available sacrifice performance in order to combat the problems of heat dissipation.

One card that turns that idea on its head is one of the latest models from Asus, the EAH6770 DC SL/2DI/1GD5, a card whose appearance is as impressive as its model name.

With a graphics card that is silent and has very good performance, there has to be a catch, and indeed there is one – the card is massive (290x170x50mm), thanks to the huge cooler, which is so big it dwarfs the circuit board on which the card is built. It's certainly not a card you can shoehorn into a compact PC.

Sitting under the cooler, which uses a four-heatpipe 8mm direct contact design to dissipate the heat, is an AMD HD6770 graphics processor with a core clock speed of 850MHz. The 1GB of GDDR5 memory on the card speeds along at 1000MHz.

The direct contact design of heat sink uses the heatpipes themselves as part of the base design of the GPU contact plate, rather than having the pipes running through the middle of the contact plate as they do in a standard heat sink design.

Performance-wise the EAH6770 DC certainly impressed: it can keep up with a standard HD6770 with a conventional cooler and fan. It scored 2,811 in Futuremark's 3DMark 11 Performance preset, while using the Dark Tower map in the game Just Cause 2 at the 1080p resolution gave a decent average frame rate of 57-frames per second (fps). Using the built-in benchmark of one of the latest DirectX 11 games, Dirt 3, produced an average frame rate of 38fps when tested at the 1080p resolution.

For video output the back plate of the card has the usual sockets (VGA, DVI and HDMI) so most options are covered. The card uses a six-pin power connector to supply the extra power it needs to run, and if your PC's power supply doesn't have the necessary power Asus has put a six-pin-PCI-Express-to-four-pin Molex power adaptor in the box.