Silence is golden
Sapphire Technology has introduced what it claims to be the world's fastest silent graphics card.
Powered by ATI's Radeon HD 5670 GPU, the ULTIMATE edition uses a large top-mounted heatsink that's augmented by an array of cooling fins connected via a heatpipe.
We like the fact that zero-fan cooling isn't compromised by a diminution of clockspeeds, as the ULTIMATE ships with a reference-matching 775MHz core and 1GB of 4,000MHz-rated GDDR5 memory.
The TDP of the HD 5670 GPU is in the region of 60W when under load, representing the upper end of what a passive heatsink can handle, so we don't expect to see the 86W Radeon HD 5750 get the ULTIMATE treatment. The low-ish TDP of the HD 5670 also means that no external power is required.
The card's outputs include dual-link DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. This means that the card is compatible with a three-screen Eyefinity setup, assuming one of the monitors is powered through the DisplayPort connector. Sapphire increases display flexibility by including a DVI-to-VGA and HDMI-to-DVI adapters.
Due to be priced at around £100, intimating a slight premium on fan-cooled models, the Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 ULTIMATE might make sense for folk looking at a non-3D-orientated three-display setup from a near-silent PC. That's pretty niche, granted, but does it appeal to you?
