This graphics card has an excellent passive GPU Cooler with a good build quality and is a mainstream focused videocard for your quiet PC build. Whether you are building a low noise PC or a quiet HTPC, this videocard should do everything you need without the noise of an air cooler. HIS didn't cut any corners and still provides the consumer with GDDR5 RAM while other manufacturers have GDDR3 or even GDDR2 installed. It overclocks reasonably well for a silent videocard, it's cheap and it has all the display connections.

Overclocking:

This video card has a 100% stable overclock of 665Mhz core and 1100Mhz memory which resulted in a 15Mhz (2%) core and 100Mhz (3%) DDR5 increase over stock clock rates.

Heatsink

HIS version uses a normal, but large passive heatsink on the VPU to extract and remove heat from the onboard processor. There is no use of heatpipes which is getting more common today and instead it uses and old school heatsink-on-top of VPU configuration. And to be honest, this cooler works very well for this intended purpose seeing during full load, the processor is still being kept at slightly below 60c during maximum stability testing using FurMark.

Benchmarks:

3DMark Vantage, 3DMark2006, Far Cry 2, Quake Wars: Enemy Territory, Devil May Cry 4, Crysis WarHead, Stalker: Call of Pripyat, DIRT 2.

Compared to:

• Sapphire Ultimate HD 5550
• HIS HD5570
• Asus ENGT240
• Axle GT 220

Test Setup:

• CPU : Intel QX9770 Extreme
• Mainboard : Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4
• Memory : 2GB PC8500 DDR2 Crucial Ballistix Tracer
• OS : Windows Vista Ultimate
• HDD: Maxtor 250GB