HIS is a company known for their various AMD based video cards, especially those with the excellent IceQ cooler. We have looked a lot of their cards and overall, we've been very impressed with their quality and performance. One of their popular line of cards has been the cards using the various IceQ coolers from Arctic Cooling. While the IceQ coolers are really silent even when the cards are running at maximum performance, they still emit a bit of sound, enough to annoy those who want a totally silent system. The solution, of course, is to make the card passive cooled, and HIS also offers a few passively cooled cards where they have partnered up with Zalman to cool them passively. - Bjorn3D

HIS Radeon HD 4650 iSilence 512MB Cooling Preview

The GPU that HIS has chosen for their first passively cooled solution is the Radeon HD 4650 chip. This is a not an enthusiast GPU. Instead, it is aimed at the mainstream users. Together with the Zalman VNF100, it however also looks like a perfect candidate for a slightly more powerful home theater PC card. This cooler has three high performance heatpipes to provide maximized heat transfer. It comes with thin aluminum fins which makes sure it is not too heavy for the video card. The card comes in a regular HIS box with nothing more than the card, a few adaptors and a driver CD in it. The basics to get you started.

We do miss the excellent tool that HIS includes with many of their other cards. The most prominent feature of the card is of course the Zalman cooler. On the front of the card we see the huge blue cooler with Zalman's logo. The cooler is not that thick, so the card should work in CrossFireX if you would like it to. The three heatpipes extend from the front of the card to the back of the card. On the back of the card we find the only indication that this is an HIS card, as they put their logo on the smaller heatsink. The card comes with two DVI plus the obligatory video connector, and HDMI is handled with the included adapter.

There is a lot to like with the HIS Radeon HD 4650 iSilence edition. As with other HIS products we have seen, it feels like a high quality card. The Zalman cooler can be bought separately, but that means you have to strip your current card from the fan, risking damaging it. It feels a lot safer to just buy the card with the cooler pre-installed. The cooler itself performs very well and still manages to keep the temperatures down to accetable levels with lots of room to spare. The card costs around $89 which makes it slightly more expensive than a regular Radeon HD 4650, but we feel it is well worth the money if you want a totally silent card.

The gaming performance of the card is adequate and we actually were a bit surprised that it did performs as well as it did in Far Cry 2, a brand new game. This means that the card certainly can be used for gaming as long as you turn down the quality levels a bit. Last but not least, the card excels in media playback. The Radeon HD 3650 was the card of choice for many home theater PC's last year and we are quite certain that the Radeon HD 4650 will be as popular. With its passive cooling solution, the HIS Radeon HD 4650 iSilence version is even more suited for an home theater PC.