Gigabyte Radeon X1300 Pro

     The Silent Pipe II on the GV-RX13P256DE-RH  is a tried and true cooling solution that Gigabyte has included on other video cards that they manufacture. With this X1300 Pro card, they chose not to use the 'top' side of the cooling apparatus. They Only used a single cooling pipe, but it goes to pretty large heatsink. The smaller core logic and relatively low clock speeds should be very safe with this cooling solution provided you have some good airflow in your enclosure.

     This is getting really up close and personal to the heatsink mounted over the edge of the card. Not that video cards have much in line of space taking components, but they have manage to accommodate the few that they do have. Like these two high rising capacitors. The DVI and Analog connectors also have a lot of breathing room, but that really doesn't matter because they aren't affected by heat much anyway.

     Not a great picture, but the writing on the Hynix memory chip is pretty hard to get to stand out. I used some Hue and Saturation adjustments to get it a little more legible for you folks interested in what memory sits on the card. My personal thoughts on this are; it won't matter much. The card is in the budget class and it uses passive cooling.  Any attempts to overclock this card probably won't go very far. If the buyer puts active cooling on the card, then they have totally defeated the purpose of the silent passive cooling anyway.

     The business end of the heatsink will be taking up the second expansion slot and slightly protruding out the back of the enclosure. Most of the time, we pretty much write off the second slot next to the video card anyway. A way of thinking that we've been following since video cards first made their way to the AGP slot. Well, most of the time that works. Except with some Crossfire and SLI capable motherboards. A wise system builder would look at his video card strategy and make sure that future expansions will work with motherboard you have chosen. Since most motherboards already come with LAN, RAID,  and acceptable audio solutions, the only thing you may be thinking of adding is a high quality audio card.