HIS Radeon HD 6670 iSilence 4: graphics card

There used to be a time not too long ago if you wanted a passive-cooled (fan-less) graphics card in your system you'd have had to give up all notion of having any gaming performance as manufacturers either used very slow cards or used lower memory specs to help get rid of the heat.

But things have changed and today's passive cards give good games-playing performance as well as silence.

In a way HIS has turned back the clock with the Radeon HD 6670 iSilence 4: it does use a great graphics core in the shape of AMD's HD6670, one of the best bang-per-buck cores available, but HIS has saddled it with 1GB of DDR3 memory instead of the usual GDDR5. This does have a detrimental effect on gaming performance and it does lose out to some of its passively cooled HD 6670 rivals that keep with the more advanced memory in performance terms. The memory runs at 1600MHz while the core engine is clocked at 800MHz.

However, using DDR3 memory has allowed HIS to use a compact cooling layout without having to worry about keeping the memory chips cool. The cooler system consists of two parts: a finned heatsink directly sitting over the core and a fairly compact passive-finned Zalman cooler. The two are joined together by three heat-pipes. The complete package makes the HD6670 iSilence 4 easier to fit into a small media PC or HTPC case than some of its more bulky competitors.

Another good point is that because of the HD6670's modest power demands it only needs to draw power from the computer's PCI-Express x16 slot so you don't have to worry if you don't have enough power cables from the power supply. On the backplate you'll find single VGA, DVI and HDMI outputs.

Performance-wise the card made heavy weather of most of the DX11 titles around at the moment thanks to the memory - it gave just 16fps in the Aliens v Predator benchmark at the 1080p resolution and 13fps in DiRT3, but then that's not really the point.

The card is ideal for a quiet or near silent PC where games performance isn't an issue but silence is and in a HTPC where its HDMI, 7.1 audio support and AMD's HD3D technology come into play.