After taking a look at ASUS' passively cooled Extreme N8600 GTS Silent board a few weeks ago, today we turn our attentions to a somewhat more demure, streamlined board from ASUS, again based around a silent cooling solution. Thanks to its lower clock speeds, the Extreme N8600 GT has no need for the massive heatsink utilised by its bigger brother, and thus offers a far more compact graphics board all-in-all. This allows a smaller design though sticking with the passive cooling for their Silent series. In that light, we still have to notice a dual slot cooling solution being used to reduce the heat generated by the graphics core. But how well does it perform for its price point? - Elite Bastards

ASUS Extreme N8600 GT Silent Video Board Review

The G84 chips is based upon the same basic design as NVIDIA's high-end G80 core, and thus features the same DirectX 10, unified shader architecture as its big brother. That aside, the G84 uses the smaller 80 nanometre manufacturing process compared to the 90nm G80, packing 289 million transistors into its die. This allows for the G84 core to feature a cut-down G80-esque configuration, containing 32 stream processors. The G84 chip also comes equipped with that bastion of the mid-range graphics board in the form of a 128-bit memory bus, compared to the 320-bit and 384-bit buses seen on G80.

A reference GeForce 8600 GT part features core and memory clock speeds of 540MHz and 1400MHz respectively, with the stream processors clocked at 1190MHz, which also happens to be the clock speeds chosen by ASUS for the Extreme N8600 GT Silent. As we just mentioned, the Extreme N8600 GT rigidly follows NVIDIA's reference clocks for the GeForce 8600 GT, leaving it to distinguish itself on account of its cooling solution, which we take our first peek at below. The board itself is straightforward enough, and typical of most GeForce 8600 GT PCB's, with no external power required and SLI support available.

The cooling solution is really very modest compared to the massive protruding heatsink used by the Extreme N8600 GTS Silent, and comprises of simply one large heatsink over the core, designed to vent hot air out of the rear of the case. As with the Extreme N8600 GTS part, the bright, plastic let's game section of the cooler looks a little cheap and out of place to me, but each to his own. From the rear, we can see that the passive cooling solution aboard the Extreme N8600 GT Silent is a dual slot one, as you may have already guessed, the hot air is designed to be vented through the rear of the chassis.

When it comes to overclocking a graphics board utilising passive cooling, you can quite often expect to achieve lower overclocks compared to an equivalent actively cooled part. So, how does ASUS' Extreme N8600 GT fare in this discipline? Starting with the GPU core, our overclocking left us with a stable clock speed of 590MHz, giving us an additional 50MHz to play with. This in turn increases the shader core clock of the board from its default 1190MHz up to 1296MHz. Finally, the memory on-board our sample allowed us to achieve an overclock of 120MHz from the stock speed of 1400MHz.

It's really quite simple to sum up the plus points of ASUS' Extreme N8600 GT Silent, the passive cooling is definitely a good thing if you're looking to build a silent or quiet running system, and even at reference clocks the GeForce 8600 GT is still the performance leader at its price point assuming that you want to use anti-aliasing in game titles. Add to that DirectX 10 support and the impressive video playback capabilities of the Extreme N8600 GT, and you also have a graphics board that may tempt home theater PC builders who also want the ability to do a little casual gaming.

Although, as HDMI becomes a more important part of the home theater, the lack of this functionality may be a black mark against NVIDIA's current offerings for some. Price wise, the silent cooling solution employed by the Extreme N8600 GT comes at around a $20 price premium compared to other GeForce 8600 GT boards running at similar clock speeds. Whether it's worth the extra is, of course, entirely dependent on how important silent running of your GPU is to you. If silence is your game, DirectX 10 and top-notch video playback is a necessity, then ASUS' Extreme N8600 GT does the job very nicely.