X-bit labs

X-bit labs CeBIT 2005 Coverage: Day 7 (page 2)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/24/2005 | 04:56 PM ]

Graphics Cards with Passive Cooling –A New Trend

From tiny print circuit boards with a couple of chips on them, graphics cards have evolved into monsters that occupy up to two slots and are more expensive than even mainboards and mainstream microprocessors. For years now, graphics cards have been using rather huge coolers that caused a lot of noise. Nevertheless, these days graphics cards makers are coming back into the days when their devices were utterly quiet: using modern engineering and expertise in cooling it is possible to use passive cooling even for performance-mainstream graphics cards, or, at least, make them a lot more silent while sustaining efficiency.

At CeBIT 2005 a number of graphics cards makers, including GeCube, Gigabyte Technology and Tul Corp. demonstrated their graphics cards with innovative cooling solutions, including passive coolers.

GeCube Makes Cooling Wiser

GeCube offers a range of passively-cooled graphics cards, including RADEON X700 PRO, RADEON X600 XT and RADEON 9550. For more advanced products GeCube is planning to introduce its Uni-Wise cooler that is proclaimed to be very efficient yet silent.

  

GeCube’s graphics cards with passive cooling

Uni-wise system will have several cornerstones, according to GeCube:

• 7.5cm fan which speed is dynamically adjusted by a special thermal chip;
• Copper heatsink;
• Heat-pipe used to transfer heat from the hottest spots to different parts of the heatsink;
• Backside copper plate;
• Thermal pads for more efficient memory cooling;
• Silent (less than 20db) operation while video playback.

Uni-Wise will be installed onto special versions of the RADEON X800- and X850-series graphics cards. GeCube will also offer typical versions of the boards with default coolers like those used by ATI’s reference graphics cards.

  
GeCube’s UniWise in action

Currently the company has no plans to introduce products based on visual processing units from different suppliers, such as NVIDIA Corp..

Tul Investigates Passive Cooling

Tul Corp, who has been very successful with its high-end graphics cards business, continues to innovate. At CeBIT 2005 the firm demonstrated its RADEON X700 PRO and RADEON X800 graphics cards with passive coolers featuring heat-pipes.

  
PowerColor’s graphics cards with passive cooling

Both products run at reference design speeds and more represent an ongoing investigation in demand for graphics cards without fan and reliability of passive coolers, rather than a lineup of products. Still, Tul seems to be more confident in passive cooling than GeCube, as GeCube did not showcase RADEON X800 without a fan.

Tul is also expected to maintain its loyalty to ATI Technologies.

Gigabyte Provides Broad Range of Passive Cooled Graphics

Gigabyte Technology is currently the company who has the largest amount of high-performance graphics cards that attribute heat-pipe passive coolers in the product family. Currently the company offers 8 powerful graphics cards for AGP 8x and PCI Express x16 slots without fans, which is the leading array in the industry.

Gigabyte’s RADEON X800 XL for AGP 8x with passive cooler

Gigabyte’s RADEON X800 for PEG x16 with passive cooler

Among Powered by ATI range of graphics cards Gigabyte offers passive cooling for RADEON X700 PRO, RADEON X800 and RADEON X800 XL visual processing units. The company also has numerous passively cooled boards featuring NVIDIA’s GPUs: GeForce 6600, GeForce 6600 GT and GeForce 6800.