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Powerful graphics cards tend to get very hot and our favourite, the Radeon HD 4850 (Labs, Shopper 248) is no exception.
Fans are the most effective way of keeping a card cool, but they can be noisy. Thankfully, some mid-range graphics cards, such as this HD 4670, are available with entirely passive heatsinks.
As the card’s name suggests, this card is silent, which is great for living room PCs. One downside is the size of the heatsink, which is big enough to prevent you putting anything in the next expansion slot. This could be a serious problem in cramped media centre cases.
Its Radeon HD 4670 chipset and 1GB of RAM aren’t capable of running the most demanding games in high resolutions, as shown by its 14.7fps in our Crysis test. However, if you’re happy to stick to PC games designed primarily for games consoles, such as the latest Tomb Raider (see page 63), then it’s more than capable. We got 41fps from Call of Duty 4 at a typical HD TV resolution of 1,360×768.
We saw similarly smooth results from many other games, even at high detail settings. This card will make your games look better than an Xbox 360, and your PC should be much quieter than one, too. It’s a great way of adding 3D gaming to your media centre PC. However, for the price of this card and a decent joypad, you could pretty much buy yourself the £125 Xbox 360 Arcade package.
