14 DAY TRIAL // Though Advanced Micro Devices promised it would soon unveil its Southern Islands family of graphics products, its partners are still releasing customized versions of existing cards on a daily basis, and Gigabyte decided it would try to stand out from the fold by giving the HD 5770 a passive cooling treatment.
Basically, Gigabyte took the ATI Radeon HD 5770 and turned it into the GV-R577SL-1GD, a video board with a dual-slot cooler capable of keeping heat low without any need for fans.
To provide the necessary level of stability and endurance, Gigabyte implemented the Ultra Durable design, which it then complemented with the aforementioned cooler, dubbed Silent Cell.
The heatsink uses four copper heatpipes to draw heat out of the graphics processing unit (GPU) and dissipate it across the many fins.
Said heatsink is composed of several fin arrays, one of which rests on top of the board.
The GPU of this model is clocked at 850 MHz, whereas the 1GB of GDDR5 VRAM has a clock speed of 4,800 MHz.
The video card also boasts 800 Stream Processors, a 128-bit memory interface, a HDMI output, a D-Sub and a dual-link DVI.
Needless to say, the video controller supports the full host of features that AMD's HD 5000 series are known for.
This includes not only the obvious DirectX 11 graphics technology support, but also OpenGL 3.1, Shader Model 5.0 and CrossFire X (for multi-GPU configurations), among other things.
Other specifications include HDCP support and compliance with the RoHS directive. Finally, the model boasts ATI Avivo HD, which provides high-quality, smooth HD video playback, allowing PCs to act as digital home media centers.
Finally, the newcomer has, unfortunately, not been given a price or release date, but it should not take very long for these details to finally be made public.