Do you hear anything? No? Good!
A passively cooled Radeon HD 7850 could be the centerpiece of a home theater PC (HTPC).
If you're building a silent PC, nothing beats a passively cooled GPU. Ditching all those spinning fans works wonders for noise levels! Unfortunately, most passively cooled video cards tend to be less-powerful models; with great power comes greater thermals, after all. Colorful, a Chinese graphics card maker, is bucking that trend and working hard to bring a fanless GTX 680 to the market.AMD’s Radeon HD 5000-series cards are already considerably more power efficient than anything in Nvidia’s Fermi lineup, but PowerColor’s Go Green series of cards are engineered to consume even less electrical power than reference design-cards. This passively cooled Radeon HD 5750 (PowerColor part number AX5750 1GBD5-NS3DH, to be precise) draws all the power it needs from the PCI Express bus, so it doesn’t require a dedicated six-pin power cable. No fan means no noise.
