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PowerColor to release two passive X1950's

Published on 18th December 2006 by Tim Smalley

Expect PowerColor's passively cooled Radeon X1950 cards to launch in 1Q07.

In conjunction with Arctic Cooling, PowerColor is preparing to launch a couple of passively cooled Radeon X1950's in the first quarter of next year and we've managed to get hold of a few tidbits about the new card.

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:

17 Comments

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mclean007 18th December 2006, 19:03

Holy cow, Batman, that's one mahoosive heatsink!

atanum141 18th December 2006, 19:07

apparantly 4c cooler than stock single slot coolers

DXR_13KE 18th December 2006, 19:22

nice..... quiet and powerful cooling, i hope this becomes a trend even if it is huge.

specofdust 18th December 2006, 19:29

Perfect, I've been planning an upgrade before mid-range 8800's come out and a 1950Pro was on the list, a silent one will be uber.

Aankhen 18th December 2006, 20:49

Pah. I've already got my passively-cooled 7950 GT. :D

Mankz 18th December 2006, 21:18

looks like mit might not fit in some cases....

r4tch3t 18th December 2006, 21:54

Holy hell, that is huge.

Sleepstreamer 18th December 2006, 21:55

Oh my... No SLi there guys :)

Ramble 18th December 2006, 21:59

120mm fan on that would be awesome.

Tulatin 18th December 2006, 23:47

Won't fit in most narrow cases it seems :S. It's also WELL out of the question for HTPC builders, unless they fancy knocking a hole in the roof

Wolfwood 19th December 2006, 04:28

i cant figure out the big deal about having 0 noise, do people find it that irritating?

BioSniper 19th December 2006, 04:38

If you have to ask then you clearly don't understand how infuriating the noise gets ;)

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

Duste 19th December 2006, 04:55

That looks ugly beyond belief. At least XFX's passively cooled 7950GT actually looked good.

DeX 19th December 2006, 11:18

Would sir like a graphics card with his heatsink? :o

specofdust 19th December 2006, 12:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by Duste
That looks ugly beyond belief. At least XFX's passively cooled 7950GT actually looked good.

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.

Atomic 19th December 2006, 14:02

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