Silence is golden. That rule applies as well to cinemas as it does to your PC. Gone are the days when we were proud of having 5000RPM fans stuck to our CPUs and GPUs that ran at full speed and produced noise levels equivalent to a runway. With the move towards Small form factor and HTPCs, we now want our PCs to be as quiet as possible- preferably dead silent. However using the latest & greatest in technology always comes more power consumption and heat dissipation requiring noisy cooling. With the GV-RX16T25V-RH, Gigabyte takes a shot at helping out.

The GV-RX16T25V-RH is based on ATI's x1600XT GPU and Gigabyte makes it a completely fan-free solution by sticking a Zalman heatsink to it. Being fan free also means noise-free and thus the GV-RX16T25V-RH is rated at 0dB as far as noise levels are considered.

Gigabyte packages the card in a long and narrow attractive box that proudly states the Silent Pipe II bar graph. Inside the box, you find the graphics card along with a DVI -> DSUB converter, the user manual and drivers CD as well as Xpand Rally and Power Director 3. Gigabyte also bundles a breakout VIVO box that supports standard and High Definition displays.

Here is the tesbed that was used.

CPU:	AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ CPU
Memory:	2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 Memory Module
Motherboard:	ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe (ATI X3200)
Optical/Hard Drives:	Generic 8X DVDRW,  Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM/8MB Cache SATA
Monitor:	LG 19" CRT Monitor
Operating System:	Windows XP Professional SP2
VGA Drivers:	ATI Catalyst 6.2

We've selected the following games at different resolution and details as well as 3D Marks for benchmarking. Here is a detailed breakdown 

Synthetic Benchmarks:	3D Mark 2001SE, 3D Mark 2003 and 3D Mark 2005 (For Fill Rates & Shaders as well) - Default Settings.
Call of Duty 2:	1280x1024,1600x1200  and 2048x1536 resolutions using nVidia demo2
F.E.A.R	1280x960 & 1600x1200 resolutions using built-in performance measurement utility
Quake 4	1280x1024 and 2048x1536 resolutions with Guru3d demo
Serious Sam 2	1600x1200 and 2048x1536 resolutions with The Tech Report demo
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory	1280x960 & 1600x1200 resolutions using built-in timedemo

As always, if you have any