Gigabyte Radeon HD 6770 Silent-Cell Review - PAGE 1

Gigabyte has implemented its Silent-Cell passive cooling design across multiple graphics cards, one of the notable offering being the high-end (for its time) Radeon HD 4850. The power ratings for high-end graphics cards has grown sustainably since then, so in today's market passively cooled heatsinks tend to delegated to mid-range products such as the graphics card we are about to examine, Gigabyte's Radeon HD 6770 which is the the latest Silent-Cell graphics card to hit the market featuring a custom design based on the Juniper XT graphics processor.

The Silent-Cell uses a fully passive cooling design that incorporates advanced thermal technologies such as ultra-thin layered fins, large surface areas, aluminum nodes and high performance heatpipes, allowing the heatsink to keep GPUs cool while remaining completely silent during operation. Gigabyte has even go as far as testing Silent-Cell with graphics cards for up to 100 gaming hours in a test chamber set to an ambient temperature of 50°C (122°F). The Silent-Cell design also leverages Gigabyte's Ultra Durable VGA technology which features 2oz of copper PCB throughout the PCB, Tier one Samsung or Hynix based memory, all Japanese solid capacitors, ferrite core chokes, and a low RDS (on) MOSFET. As you can see, Gigabyte has really done its homework developing the Silent-Cell design.

Gigabyte explains the design in these terms;

"GIGABYTE rewrites the history of silent cooling to perfect the thermal performance, by introducing the state-of-the-art Silent-Cell Cooling Technology which adopts a series of crimping layered fins with Aluminum nodes. Thanks to proprietary cell-division thermal architecture and ultra-huge pure copper base with 3 heat pipes, Silent-Cell are able to cool down the GPU up to 18°C more than by using an active fan cooling design. In addition, Silent-Cell cooler module utilizes the precision process to deliver zero-interval combination between heat pipe and fins, enhancing the overall cooling capability without any compromise from its material characteristic."

The Gigabyte HD 6770 is one of many custom designs using the Juniper core, and unlike the Radeon HD 5770 there is no standard AMD reference design for manufacturers to follow. This gives the manufacturers free rein to design their own custom boards and thermal solutions. Essentially, this means the HD 6770 is available in multiple designs, and no one card will be like the other.