PowerColor Rolls Out Passively Cooled HD 7850 SC3 Card

[N.Broekhuijsen]

PowerColor has announced the arrival of a passively cooled HD 7850 graphics card.

PowerColor Rolls Out Passively Cooled HD 7850 SC3 Card : Read more

 

[christiangordon]

I am interested in this!

 

[zooted]

That's a good amount of horsepower for a passive cooling, nice.

 

[Shneiky]

Interesting piece of hardware. I would be really interested in purchasing this for OpenCL acceleration. My only concern is temps at 80/90% load for 10 or more minutes. Sometimes these cards create a heat pocket. I am using Asus passive cards for years and in certain conditions that heat pocket really gets temps sky-high. Should be tested in a case with CPU centered cooling configuration. After all I think this card is a better fit for workstations (lets not start about the old argument what is a workstation and what is not) than for gamers. Better OpenCL computation than nVidia, good multy monitor support and snappy view port in 3D applications. Next to see is temp and price.

 

[halcyon]

While I like the thought of passive cooling it would seem, at first thought, that if the card causes high temps those will simply leak into the rest of your system. So you'd have to have really good airflow to accommodate the potential temperature increase.
...or am I over-thinking it?

 

[CarolKarine]

if you want a quiet system that has some oomph, go watercooling. passive cooling works, but not for a lot of load all the time.

 

[spentshells]

No word on pricing but let me assure you it will be a lot and worth it.

 

[icemunk]

Passive cooling is great, but you still need good airflow in your case.

 

[cirdecus]

Pretty cool. My experience with modern passively cooled cards is that you need a ton of airflow in your case along with a very low ambient room temperature.
Unfortunately, most people purchasing this card will be aiming for as little fans as possible, which ultimately will cause this card to get too hot.

 

[zooted]

That's a good amount of horsepower for a passive cooling, nice.

 

[CaedenV]

I love passively cooled cards! One of my greatest hopes of the next gen cards is that the die shrinks will allow for more upper midrange cards to be passively cooled. My system had decent airflow with nice big quiet low RPM fans, and I hate that most GPUs come with big noisy blower units, or inefficient normal fans. I replaced the stock fan on my GTX570 with a nice quiet Zalman cooler set on low, and that seems to do the trick, but if next gen I can get a more powerful card with passive cooling then I will be all over that!

 

[elemein]

Hear that? It's the sound of every silent build cheering with glee.
Pun intended.

 

[RedJaron]

I wonder what kind of temps this would stay at in a Raven type case.

 

[bit_user]

Sorry CaedenV, that's not going to happen any time soon.
Manufacturer's will awalys use the efficiency gains from process improvements to improve performance, in the upper midrange & high-end. To do otherwise means losing out to the competition.
The only exception would be mobile. Even then, they're working within a power budget and trying to use it to get as much performance as possible, rather than starting with a performance target and making it as efficient as possible.