Guru3D takes a look at the Inno3D GeForce 7950 GT i-Chill edition. Equipped with a remarkably playable graphics core (clocked faster than reference) and equipped with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, this product is ready to bark loudly in your PC. Let's see if passive cooling (no fans thus 100% silent) can keep a GeForce 7950 GT cool enough:

Well there we go. What was really interesting to see performance wise was that the performance difference between the iChill 256MB model and reference 512 MB model 7950 GT is pretty much close to nothing. It's because the iChill is clocked slightly higher and can compensate a little on that loss. On the long term my bet is to go for a 512 MB card though. Future games will have larger and more textures. Memory is so important, but fact is that dropping 256MB will significantly drop the price as well and it can save you a good 50-60 bucks easily. So if you are on a set budget I might have found the right card for you. In retrospect an iChill 7900GS will get you close to the 7950 GT performance as well, and that product is even less expensive.

So this conclusion is getting a little complex. Let's stick to the card itself. For the money obviously you'll get a lot of features and performance. I'm really fond of what Inno3D is doing with the iChill series. If you are in the market for a very decent graphics card that is totally silent (example for a HTPC) then this is most certainly one brilliant piece of hardware to pick up. Bare in mind though that the GPU will get hot and that the residual heat is being dumped inside your PC. Personally I would go for the iChill edition with active cooling. It makes use of the Arctic cooler (NV Silencer 6), cools brilliantly, dumps the heat outside the PC and isn't at all noisy, all for the same amount of money. Then again if you have enough ventilation in your case or work with an open chassis then this is not an issue.

A silly error on the product is that the passive cooler although nice looking, is rather big and blocking the SLI connector. You can not get two of these cards and set them up in SLI. That's not good. Furthermore there's not many negatives to report on this Inno3D iChill card other than the fact that it's not a DirectX 10 product. Gradually over this year Vista will slowly become more important, and thus also DirectX 10 gaming. I do however feel it'll be a long time before we actually will see a good number of DX10 games to choose from so whether that would really be an issue is something I'll leave to you.