Many partners of NVIDIA and ATI-AMD have introduced passive cooled cards for a long time. Passive cooling hasn’t only been applied to entry level cards. Thanks to more complex cooling solutions, more and more upper end performance segment cards are actually beginning to appear that feature completely silent cooling.

We took a look at three passively cooled Radeon cards from MSI. The first two are based on the X1650 GPU. Although their cooling solutions have been designed differently, their overall approach is to move heat towards the back of the PCB. The third card is based on the Radeon X1950PRO GPU. The card’s most prominent feature is the large heatsink which it comes installed with. The heatsink itself covers nearly the entire card. It is also interesting to notice that on the top right of the board MSI has placed a 4-pin molex connector for additional power in place of the newer 6-pin PCIe connector.

PowerColor and Club 3D have opted for the same type of passive cooling systems to use with their Radeon X1650 and Radeon X1950 cards. The cooling system has been designed by Artic Cooling, a company famous for its balance between efficiency and noise. In this case, four heatpipes are in contact with the GPU, which then lead to a large heatsink which covers the entire surface of the card.

ATI cards aren’t the only ones that were passively cooled at CeBIT. Gainward was using a thick heatsink for its Bliss 7600GT 256 SFX card, while Inno3D was also using an Artic Cooling solution, the iChill, for its GeForce 7950 GTs based GPUs.