14 DAY TRIAL // Usually, high performance graphics cards and passive cooling just don't mix, but don't try to tell that to PowerColor since the company is working on the first ever passively cooled Radeon HD 6850 video card, its design following to be finalized in the not so distant future.
This is good news indeed for all you silent PC fans out there, since high-end GPUs rarely get passive cooling solutions, the large amount of heat displaced by the graphics core and voltage circuitry preventing this from happening.
But this hasn't stopped PowerColor from trying to design a completely fanless HD 6580, the Taiwanese company currently evaluating a new heatsink design that, once completed, should make this card a reality.
Pictured thanks to the techpowerup website, this design makes use of a large aluminum fin array that wraps the card in an L-shape manner, using the extra space that is usually found between the top of the card and the chassis' side panel.
As a result, the heatsink, in its present form, occupies only one extra slot, this becoming effectively a two slot solution.
In order to draw heat away from the graphics core, PowerColor's design uses no less that five (pretty thick) heatpipes, although is pretty hard to tell from the pictures how are the VRM's cooled.
Coming with a load power consumption of 127W (19W idle), the Radeon HD 6850 graphics core comes with 960 stream processors and 32 ROP units, power being delivered trough a single 6-pin PCIe connector.
Although no informations about GPU and memory clock speed are known at this time, the HD 6850 GPU is usually clocked at 775MHz while the 1GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1GHz (4000MHz effective).
Finally, the PowerColor HD 6850 graphics card will be released under the company's "SCS3" line of silent graphics cards, availability and pricing being still unknown as the design is not yet finalized.
