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PowerColor to release two passive X1950's
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 18th December 2006
Expect PowerColor's passively cooled Radeon X1950 cards to launch in 1Q07.
The cards will use a massive passive cooler with four heatpipes that is designed by Arctic Cooling. Word has it that it's capable of outperforming ATI's reference cooling solution by a few degrees.
On top of the massive heatpipe cooling solution, PowerColor will also cool the memory chips and voltage regulators with passive heatsink designs too.
As impressive as that feat is, we're not quite sure whether the better performance is with the GPU loaded, or with it sitting idle. Our sources didn't give details on the scenario used to measure these temperatures.
Our sources claim that both the Radeon X1950 Pro and Radeon X1950XT cards will cost about US$10 more than the PowerColor's existing Radeon X1950 Pro and X1950XT cards.
That means we would see the passive versions available in the UK at around £145 for the X1950 Pro and just under £200 for the X1950XT part once they've been released. There are no details on clock speeds at the moment, but we expect them to be the same as PowerColor's existing X1950 Pro and X1950XT clock speeds. We'll leave you with a couple of high-resolution pictures:
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Comments (18)Stats: 0.067 seconds
I'd managed to bring the overall noise of my system down quite a bit by investing in quieter sollutions, suspending the HDD's, absorption matting etc. Sadly now the loudest part in my system is the graphics card with failing fan which I have serviced to no avail.
Something like this would be awesome but I think I need some more new kit first :p
You'll probably find that the sorts of people who spend money on high end passively cooled graphics cards are the sort who love their PC's but hate the fact that it has to be some big noisy box sitting taking up tonnes of space. I don't imagine any of them are going to care very much what it looks like.