The mere concept of a passively cooled workstation graphics card seems, quite frankly, bizarre. While admittedly not unheard of, as you probably know (presuming you own just a gaming graphics card), cooling is a key factor in their design. Put simply, if you decide to run your AMD 5700 XT passively (merely for example) you’re probably going to have a bad time.
Following two new listings on PNY’s official website, however, the graphics card manufacturer has announced that (somehow) it has produced a passively cooled Nvidia Quadro RTX 8000 and 6000 graphics card.
What is passively cooled? Well, just in case you don’t know, its when the item doesn’t have a dedicated cooling fan/s. In other words, it cools itself ‘passively’ within the ambient temperature.
So, I suppose the biggest question is how have they achieved this? Well, the short version is by making the heat spreaders larger (while somehow keeping the 2-slot design) and also (as you probably suspected) by cutting the performance back a little.
Taking the Quadro RTX 8000, for example, the boost clock speed has been dropped by 8% to 1,620 MHz. In addition, the base clocks have also been dropped by about 12% while the memory clock has also been reduced from 14Gbps to 13Gbps.
Notable, but not exactly huge drops in numbers.
Presumably, despite the passive design, these would still require to reside in a system with decent airflow. The Quadro RTX 8000 is, after all, a 250W GPU. In other words, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to just shove one in a chassis. Not, at least, without at least a couple of really good intake and exhaust fans.
The fact that PNY has made this possible, however, is simply remarkable. More so the fact that the compromises won’t dent its performance by any particularly huge factor.
With price tags of $6,000 (for the 8000) and $4000 (for the 6000), however, I think I’ll be needing a bit more spare change before I could try one of these out for myself.
You can check out the official product websites via the link here!
What do you think? Are you impressed with these designs? – Let us know in the comments!
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