The Asus EAX1600XT Silent/TVD/256M/A is a prime example of a mainstream videocard adapted to address certain acoustic concerns which are usually in the realm of much more expensive graphics cards. What I mean is that on paper it looks like a plain Radeon X1600 XT based videocard but in action, it is able to impress especially with a relatively low price of $193 CDN ($175 US, £94 GBP) and totally quiet operation.

For the money you get a videocard that's capable of running the latest games with the latest features such as Shader Model 3.0 and ATi's Crossfire compatibility. Not to mention it's completely silent thanks to a pretty sweet heatpipe-based passive heatsink.

VIVO (Video In/Video Out) compatibility comes via the ATi Rage Theatre chip. It is a nice option since more people are connecting video devices to the computer these days, but we find it disappointing to see Asus not officially support component output. A completely silent videocard like the Asus EAX1600XT Silent/TVD/256M/A would make a great HTPC (Home Theatre PC) videocard.

In the benchmarks we saw that ASUS EAX1600XT Silent/TVD/256M/A performed comparably for its GPU-class. At stock speeds the card was on par with the PowerColor Radeon X1600 XT Bravo and yielded benchmark results at about the same level as GeForce 6600GT class videocards.

It's possible that ATi might be able to eek out more performance with subsequent driver updates but you shouldn't hold your breath on that one. Casual or light gamers who do not play with antialiasing or anisotropic filtering enabled will be happy with the EAX1600XT Silent's performance at 1024x768.

If you game at higher resolutions or with AA and AF enabled, this videocard doesn't have enough GPU power to meet your requirements and you ought to be looking for gear with a little more "oom paa paa" in it.

The Asus EAX1600XT Silent/TVD/256M/A was up to our overclocking challenge, hitting 691 MHz core and 765 MHz memory in that test. Overclocking improve performance by a few percentiles at lower resolutions which helps make game play smoother too. If you do decide to get a videocard like the EAX1600XT Silent though, make sure you have adequate cooling in your case, as inadequate airflow will cause overheating.

All in all the Asus EAX1600XT Silent/TVD/256M/A is a decent mainstream videocard. If you're not a hardcore gamer and want something that's completely silent, you should now know where to look.

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