PowerColor Shows Off Passive Radeon HD 7850 Graphics Card

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

A passively cooled Radeon HD 7850 could be the centerpiece of a home theater PC (HTPC).

If you go poking around Facebook long enough, you're apt to run into teaser shots of unreleased products just like we did. Over on one of PowerColor's pages (the company has several), we spied a couple of photos of a passively cooled Radeon HD 7850 graphics card (SCS3), which to the best of our knowledge hasn't been done before. PowerColor didn't post any accompanying specs, though we suspect it will stick with the reference design.
The last thing a passively cooled card needs is overclocked parts and/or higher voltages, both of which generate additional heat. If we're correct in assuming PowerColor's card is based on AMD's reference design, it will feature an 860MHz engine clock and 2GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1,200MHz on a 256-bit bus.
It looks to be a dual-slot card with at least five heat pipes directing thermals through more than two dozen aluminum fins running horizontally across the card, plus several more on top. With no active cooling to speak of, you'll want to make sure your case has good airflow if you're considering a card like this.
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