Colorful could have a hard time convincing people they're not getting pranked looking at the industry's very first fanless, passive-cooled GeForce GTX 680 graphics card. The Chinese graphics card and motherboard designer pulled off some very audacious and fascinating designs in the past, but this one takes the cake.
Called the Colorful iGame GTX 680 Passive Edition, the card uses a completely silent cooling assembly for the 3.5 billion transistor GPU, without compromising on clock speeds. The idea behind the iGame Passive Edition appears to be not only getting the GPU to work reliably at NVIDIA reference clock speeds, but also allow a degree of overclocking by end-users. The card itself is longer than most GTX 680 graphics cards in the market, with a large aluminum fin heatsink spanning its entire length.
The main heatsink design consists of a dense array of aluminum fins (140 in number), to which heat from the GPU is conveyed by seven 8 mm-thick heat pipes. The main GPU block further has grooves for an additional six 8 mm-thick heat pipes that bridge it to the optional, secondary heatsink that can be attached to the reverse side of the card. This heatsink must be attached before venturing into overclocking. Together, the two heatsinks provide a staggering 20,000 cm2 of surface area for heat dissipation.
Colorful will ship the card with at least NVIDIA reference clock speeds (1006/1058/6008 MHz core/boost/memory), though we have reason to believe the card will be designed for overclocking, or could even come with factory-overclocked speeds, looking at the pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, indicating a strong VRM. It could also be interpreted as a VRM design in which load (and heat) is spread across several phases.
Colorful Silences the GeForce GTX 680
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