The HIS HD 6570 Silence has no moving parts, no active cooling, and no noise whatsoever. An apt name then for a silent graphics card. HTPC duty is the obvious area for it, but we find out if it can game on the big screen too.
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One thing you can be sure of is that as a PC enthusiast, you’ve likely got some old hardware laying around that you could use as an HTPC. If you don’t, parts for a low power system for HTPC duty are quite cheap these days.
If you’re building from scratch, you’re going to want to get parts that keep the noise to a minimum. One important part is going to be the graphics card. In which case, HIS may have just the product you’re looking for. The , as the name suggests, is completely silent. It has no moving parts whatsoever and is cooled by a passive heat-sink Let’s check it out.
Specifications
| Model Name | HIS 6570 Silence 1GB DDR3 PCI-E DVI/HDMI/ VGA |
 Chipset |
Radeon HD 6570 PCIe Series |
| ASIC |
RadeonTM HD 6570 GPU |
| Manu. Process (Micron) |
40nm |
| Memory Size (MB) |
1024 |
| Memory Type |
DDR3 |
| Engine CLK (MHz) |
650Mhz |
| Memory CLK (Gbps) |
1.8 Gbps |
| Memory Interface (bit) |
128 |
| Power Supply Requirement |
400 Watt or greater power (500 Watt for ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode) |
| Max. Resolution |
2560*1600 |
| Bus Interface |
PCI Express2.1 x16 |
| VGA |
Yes |
| HDMI |
Yes |
| DVI |
Dual-Link DVI-D |
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HD 6570 System Requirement
- PCI Express ® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot with 2 slots space available on the motherboard
- 400 Watt or greater power supply recommended (500 Watt for AMD CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode)
- Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://support.amd.com/us/certified/power-supplies/Pages/listing.aspx for a list of Certified products
- Minimum 1GB of system memory
- Installation software requires CD-ROM drive or DVD –ROM drive, a keyboard, a mouse, and a display
- DVD playback requires DVD drive and a DVD
- Blu-ray™ playback requires Blu-ray drive and a Blu-ray disc
- For an AMD CrossFireX™ system, a second AMD Radeon™ HD 6600 Graphics card, an AMD CrossFireX™ Ready motherboard and one AMD CrossFireX™ Bridge Interconnect cable is required
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The box for the HIS HD 6570 Silence is of the usual white, with the Excalibur symbol we have come to recognize with an HIS product. The front boldly gives you the most pertinent info, while the back goes into more detail on the features.
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Opening the box, you find inside a blue box that holds the contents. You get the card itself and a small folder with a paper install guide, a software CD and a case badge. You also get info on how to join the Kingdom Of Gamer support program for HIS products. Just to point out here, when you run the software CD to install the driver, it will also have an option to download the latest driver rather than leaving you with a possibly older driver that’s on the disk.
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The card itself is small but imposing thanks to the big black heat-sink. Being a silence card, the heat-sink is completely passive. This looks to be the same heat-sink used on the previous 5xxx series Silence cards, which we liked quite a bit. It has a bird of prey style winged appearance to it, plenty of surface area, but the fins are wide enough apart that cleaning should be a simple effort.
Here is a shot of the rear, although there isn’t much to see.
The output options for the card are pretty standard for a lower end card such as this. You get a full-size HDMI port, a full-size DisplayPort Port, and a DVI-I port. Plenty of connections for a smaller card.
You might be surprised to know that the 6750 Silence is also capable of CrossfireX; you simply don’t require a Crossfire Bridge connector as everything is done via the PCIe bus. A card such as this obviously has high appeal as an HTPC card, and the HIS HD 6750 Silence supports all the 6xxx series ‘Eyespeed’ features.
Testing
Test Setup: Intel Core i5 750 @ 3.8GHz, 4GB of Crucial Ballistix Tracer Ram @ 1600MHz, MSI P55-GD65, Silicon Power M10 32GB + Western Digital 640GB, Custom CPU Watercooling, Hiper Type M 730w PSU, Cooler Master Cosmos S Case. All latest drivers as of April 1st 2011 and the OS is Windows 7 64bit.
Test Software
Left 4 Dead 2 – We used a combination of FRAPS to record frame rates, and a recorded demo on the Dead Center 1st level (in the inferno) to find out the Average FPS.
Batman Arkham Asylum – Batman has a built in benchmark feature which we used to get numbers for minimum, maximum and average frame rates.
Crysis Warhead – The framebuffer benchmark was used here to find out if this card is up to running Crysis.
Colin McRae DiRT2 – DiRT2 also has a built in benchmark function, which we used to find out if this card is capable of DX11 gaming.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat Benchmark – Setting the benchmark to High, we found out the frame rates for the last portion of the test, the hardest; the Sunshafts test.
DXVA Playback – We used different media to determine the cards ability to playback video without stressing the rest of the system. We also used a much older and less powerful system to really stress the card.
