14 DAY TRIAL // Gainward, one of Nvidia's closest board partners, has just announced the introduction of two new graphics card models based on the GeForce GT 520 design, including one passively cooled low-profile solution.
The cards are called the Gainward GeForce GT520 1024MB and GeForce GT520 1024MB SilentFX and the only difference between them is the cooling solution employed.
As its name implies, the SilentFX model comes without a cooling fan and relies on an aluminum heatsink for cooling the graphics core.
The operating clocks of both cards are set at 810MHz for the GPU, while the 1GB of DDR3 video buffer works at an unusually low 535MHz (1070MHz effective), 40% under Nvidia's reference memory frequency.
Nvidia designed the GeForce GT 520 to replace the aging GeForce GT 220 and it packs the same GF119 core that the company used for its GeForce GT 410M and 520M mobile offerings.
This is basically a cut in half version of the GF108 GPU and it packs 48 stream processors, 8 texturing units, 4ROP units as well as a 64-bit wide memory interface which can be connected to as much as 2GB of DDR3 memory.
The TDP of the GT 520 is rated at 29W when the card is fully loaded and its idle power consumption is expected to sit around the 10W mark.
Gainward's GeForce GT 520 cards come equipped with a dual-link DVI port, an HDMI output and a D-Sub connector.
Although both the models use half-height PCBs, Gainward hasn't included a low-profile bracket in the retail bundle.
Right now it's pretty difficult to get an idea about the performance of the GT 520 as reviews are in short supply, but a previously leaked 3DMark result suggested that the card is about 30% faster than the Intel HD 3000 GPU used by Sandy Bridge processors.
