Proponents of silent computer systems usually have to compromise on the performance of the system when it comes to selecting the quietest components. Often, this means installing an entry-level or mid-range graphics card without any fans. Fans are a quiet PC's worst enemy. The ASUS EN7800GT TOP Silencer, on the other hand, offers good performance without any pesky fan noise.

It's based on a version of the NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT graphics chip, which is clocked at 420MHz (faster than the standard 400MHz clock speed of this chip), has 256MB of GDDR3 memory, which is clocked at 1.24GHz (faster than the 1GHz standard) and enables the latest games to be played at high resolutions and with image enhancements enabled.

Considering its speed, it's amazing that this card is cooled only by large aluminum heat sinks - it has no fans. One heat sink is attached directly to the graphics chip and heat-pipes transfer heat from it to another, hinged, heat sink, which can be shifted 90 degrees and positioned above your CPU's fan. The extra heat sink definitely makes this card very large. It gets very hot when the card is under load, so you will need at least one case fan to extract the heat that it generates.

In performance tests, the card was stable while running between 85 and 90 degrees. In Quake 4, the card scored 50 frames per second (fps) at a resolution of 1280x1024 and with 4x anti-aliasing (AA) enabled. In F.E.A.R, the card averaged 33fps at 1280x960 with 4xAA. In a closed Antec PlusView full-tower case, the card did not freeze at all during prolonged testing with the aforementioned games.