Quiet PC aficionados rejoice as PowerColor is expected to release two passive-cooled graphics cards in Q1’2007. The new passive-cooled graphics cards are based on AMD’s ATI Radeon X1950 Pro and X1950XT.  Cooling the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro and X1950XT is a cooler designed by Arctic Cooling. The cooler occupies an adjacent slot below the physical graphics card.

With the Arctic Cooling passive cooler the Radeon X1950 Pro runs approximately 4 degrees Celsius cooler than the stock AMD graphics cooler. This isn’t too surprising as the passive cooler takes advantage of four heat pipes to transfer heat from the 80nm ATI Radeon X1950 Pro GPU. It is unknown how well the passive cooler performs with the ATI Radeon X1950XT though. In addition to the new GPU cooling the new passive-cooled Power Color graphics cards feature passive heatsinks on the memory and voltage regulators as well.

Expect the passive-cooled PowerColor graphics cards to be available early next year. Pricing is of the AMD ATI Radeon X1950 Pro powered variant is expected at $209--$10 higher than the stock cooler equipped model. Pricing of the passive-cooled ATI Radeon X1950XT powered model is unknown at the moment.