Without noise and a dust

Evgenie Rudometov,

Victor Rudometov

Rudometov@rudometov.com

Using the firm development Silent-Pipe II providing usage of several heat sinks and thermal handsets, company Gigabyte has released completely silent videocard Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE

Modern high-powered geometry processors (GPU) on level teploobrazovanija quite often do not concede to the central colleagues (CPU). For support of correct operation of the videocards created on the basis of such GPU, cooling powerful tools are required. Usually such resources are presented by the cooler specially developed under everyone videocard consisting of the heat sink, installed and fixed on GPU, and also powerful fan intensively blowing in the given heat sink. At all simplicity and efficiency such systems are a powerful source of acoustic noise.

However variants of cooling systems and without fans are possible. As an example of one of such solutions it is possible to result videocard Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE created on the basis of GPU NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT.

Videocard basic element

Videocards on the basis of GPU GeForce 6600 GT, having inherited all features of the architecture of geometry processors of GeForce 6 set , handle the information parallel streams by means of the several built in pipelines. Besides, they thanks to specially designed GPU architecture are capable to execute pikselnye and topmost shejdery versions 2.0 and 3.0. In addition to it construction of scenes with a high dynamic range (HPDR), fast operation with shades (UltraShadow II), and also a number of other current technologies, including Microsoft DirectX 9.0, coding/decoding MPEG-2 is supported, etc.

In Table 1 key parametres resulted on a site of the manufacturer of data GPU — companies NVIDIA are resulted .

Table 1. Key parametres GPU NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT

The bus	PCI Express	AGP 8X
The memory interface	128 bits	128 bits
Memory pass-band	16.0 GB/SECONDS	14.4 GB/SECONDS
Speed of occupancy of the scene	4.0 billion Tekselej/second	4.0 billion Tekselej/second
Tops in a second	375 million	375 million
Frequency of memory	1000 MHz	900 MHz
Pixels on clock tick (peak)	8	8
RAMDAC	400 MHz	400 MHz

It is necessary to add, that on the basis of chips of series GeForce 6 the wide spectrum of the videocards concerning sector of mass products (mainstream) is released. Parametres of such maps are resulted in Table 2 (on site substances www.fcenter.ru).

Table 2. Key parametres of videocards with GPU NVIDIA GeForce 6

Video - Map	Kernel	That. Process Nanometer		The bus	Memory, Mb	Pipelines / Textures for clock tick	Topmost pipelines	DirectX	Frequencies The chip / memories, MHz	The bus of memory, Bit
Mass cards (mainstream)
GeForce 6600 GT	NV43	110		PCI-E	128 GDDR3	8/8	3	9.0c	500/1000	128 bits
GeForce 6600 GT	NV43	110		AGP	128 GDDR3	8/8	3	9.0c	500/900	128 bits
GeForce 6600	NV43	110		PCI-E	512 GDDR3	8/8	3	9.0c	300/550	128 bits
GeForce 6600	NV43		110	PCI-E	128/256 DDR	8/8	3	9.0c	300/550	128 bits
GeForce 6600	NV43		110	AGP	128 DDR	8/8	3	9.0c	300/500	128 bits
GeForce 6600 LE	NV43V		110	PCI-E	128 DDR	4/4	3	9.0c	300/500	128 bits

Key parametres and construction of videocard Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE

Fig. 1. A package of videocard Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE

The structure of package Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE except the map includes the documentation in English, CD-ROM and a number of cables and the adapters providing hooking up of modern videounits.

Key parametres of videocard GigabyteGV-NX66T256DE are resulted in Table 3.

Table 3. Key parametres of videocard Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE

Units and subsystems	Parametres
The geometry processor	NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT
The hooking up interface	PCI Express x16
Size of a video memory, Mb	256
Video memory type	GDDRII 16Mx16
Width the bus of a video memory, bit	128
Video	DirectX 9.0 NVIDIA SLI V / S-Vidio and HDTV output
Plugs	Provides D-Sub and DVI-I TV-Out VGA Monitor (15 pin)
The handle utility	V-Tuner II
Cooling system	Silent-Pipe II

It is necessary to mark, that videocard GPU GeForce 6600 GT has the built in memory of nonconventional size. Really, the video memory size makes 256 Mb while the standard design of videocards with GPU GeForce 6600 GT provides support only 128 Mb. But it is not mirrored negatively in stability of operation of the given videocard.

The minimum system requirements necessary for correct operation of a videocard, are presented in Table 4.

Table 4. The minimum system requirements

Units and subsystems	Parametres
The central processor unit	Pentium III 650 or AMD Athlon 650
The hooking up interface	PCI Express x16
Size of dynamic storage, Mb	64
The free space on HDD, Mb	50
The optical drive	CD-ROM or DVD-ROM
The operating system	OS Windows 2000 / Windows XP

Widespread resources of cooling high-powered GPU, consisting of the heat sink and the fan, generate considerable acoustic noise. The given noise is the negative factor. With it implementators of all computer components, forced to use traditional coolers try to struggle.

However there are also the alternative variants which are not providing usages of fans. For example, maintenance of a temperature mode necessary for correct operation GPU can be reached by means of the several compact heat sinks jointed by special heat-conducting handsets. Such handsets have received the name thermal (Heat Pipe).

The principle of operation of thermal handsets is grounded on thermophysics of transformation of the liquids concluded in hollow handsets, vehicles of transmission of thermal energy playing a role. It allows to handle heat with very high speed considerably exceeding possibilities of copper, not speaking already about aluminium and other metals. By the way, efficiency of such handsets is a lot of above the solutions created on the basis of silver.

Fig. 2. The thermal handsets jointed to the heat sink of the video chip

Specially picked up liquid under the influence of heat derivated, as a result of geometry processor operation passes in a gaseous state. Further steam reaches the cold end of the thermal handset jointed to the heat sink, disseminating heat. At the expense of cooling the liquid in a thermal handset is condensed, giving heat to a handset, and from it and to the heat sink.

Such construction has been taken as a principle systems of cooling GPU NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT videocards Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE. A method of cooling by means of the given construction consisting of several heat sinks and thermal handsets, it has been named by experts Gigabyte processing technique Silent-Pipe II. The specified construction of system of cooling GPU uses two outlines of thermal handsets. One of them takes away heat from heat sink GPU to allocated on an opposite side of a videocard to the cooling heat sink. The second outline takes away heat from heat sink GPU to the third heat sink allocated for ports.

Appearance of the given videocard is resulted in a Fig. 3 and Rice 4.

Fig. 3. Appearance of videocard Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE

Fig. 4. The Underside of videocard Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE

The turned out video subsystem is completely silent, that raises its attractiveness among potential users.

As to productivity of the specified videocard it has been estimated in the course of intensive testing.

Productivity

The numerical data resulted in Table 5 testify to productivity of videocard Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE – Table 6 and in a Fig. 5 – a Fig. 6.

Table 5. Results of performance of the test 3DMark05 for different videocards

Videocards	Results
Nvidia GeForce 5900	989
Ati Radeon X600	1574
Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT	3344

Fig. 5. Results of performance of the test 3DMark05

Table 6. Results of performance of test PCMark04 Graphics for different videocards

Videocards	Results
Ati Radeon X600	3060
Nvidia GeForce 5900	4225
Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT	4378

Fig. 6. Results of performance of test PCMark04 Graphics

The cited data do not require remarks and testify to high efficiency of videocard Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE.

In summary it is possible to recommend the given map to a wide range of the users aspiring to silent, rather high-powered systems.

Videocard Gigabyte GV-NX66T256DE has been given by the Moscow office of company Gigabyte