Gainward Geforce GT 520 SilentFX is a low profile graphics card that measures about 168mm in length. The low profile slot bracket is not included although the card’s VGA connector can be removed. The cooler is quite simple and made of a single massive aluminum block with tall fins, which makes it a dual slot card. The large dissipation surface does not require grand cooling inside the case but, naturally, it will require at least some airflow in order to dissipate heat.

The PCB is about 14.5cm long but as you can see from the picture, the cooler is longer than the card. You can see that the card has no SLI connectors but two GT 520 cards can be daisy chained in SLI mode with data transferred via PCI Express bus.

The memory chips are on the GPU side of the PCB. Although it seems as if the cooler touches the memory chips, there are a few millimeters between them.



Gainward opted for Elpida EDJ1108BDSE-DJ-F DDR3 chips which run at 1070MHz but, according to the specs, can run up to 1333MHz at 1.5 volts. The memory interface is a 64 bit, which is why the card has a low bandwidth of only 8.6GB/s.



Geforce GT 520 SilentFX has VGA, HDMI 1.4a and dual-link DVI outputs, one of each to be precise. Audio is routed directly via HDMI connector with bitstreaming support for both Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

The following picture shows the GT 520 SilentFX next to Gainward’s GTX 570 GX sample card (reviewed here) just to get a size comparison point. Both cards have dual slot coolers.

Since it’s a low-power GPU, there’s no need for additional power, i.e. the card gets all the power it needs via PCI Express. Still, users are advised to use a 300W+ PSU.