Another video card review at Rbmods tonight, we have a heavy weight card from Gigabyte in the left ring corner with a silent pipe cooling technology that weighs in at an amazing 400 grams. Can it stand up against the other "heavy" weight cards in the right ring corner? Seriously yes, we will take a look at this new card from Gigabyte which seems to mainly focus on speed and silence so it will be interesting to see what we can do with this product.
About Gigabyte:
The success of Giga-Byte Technology has exceeded all expectations. With the commitment to upgrading the IT industry, Giga-Byte Technology built up a solid foundation upon the envisioned industry scale. These efforts have earned Giga-Byte Technology an eminent and widespread reputation, as well as the focus of attention and accomplishment around the world. With the respectable performance of motherboard business and global reputation along with worldwide brand awareness, Giga-Byte Technology is making steady progress to become one of the best total IT product providers in the world.
Specifications:
Chipset ATI RADEON X800
Memory 256 MB
Memory Bus 256 bit
BUS PCI-e x 16
D-SUB Y
TV-OUT Y
DVI Port Y
MultiView Y
H/W Monitor N
Tools V-Tuner II
GAME 2
Software Power DVD 5.0
The board:
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The well known Gigabyte box by now with the Gigabyte logo to the left and a figure in the middle with the card name printed with big text and some main features of the card. On the back you can read specifications and features in serveral different languages.
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Included with the card is a few good games like Joint operations and Thief expansion set and also the driver cd. It's nice when a company included some recent games so you can really test out your new card without having to buy some games. I like the manuals Gigabyte makes as they are very informative and gives you all the info you need to know about the card. I forgot to mention that PowerDVD5 is included also which is a great program that allows you to watch movies and dvds on your computer. Two adapter are included one for VGA to DVI and the other adapter is from S-video to 4 different connectors for Tv out.
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This cards TV out supports HDTV which is a very nice new feature. As we can see on the right picture you have some choices to connect to the tv depending on the connector on the tv itself.
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Time to have a closer look at the card itself and as said before this card is equipped with heatpipes and heatsinks and is completely fanless. So what are the benefits of this? Well you get a quiet card which gives you a quieter rig. The bad parts might be that during the summer the card overheats but does that happen with this card? That is what we are here to find out. The heatinsks are gold colored which gives the card a cool look but as we know looks are not everything. Two nice heatpipes connect the heatsinks together to move the heat of the memory and the core.
