Conclusion

Final words and verdict

Obviously passive cooling comes with certain limitations, you will need a chassis with a bit of airflow, With no airflow at all you'll be hitting 83 Degrees C. However even a small amount of airflow will allow this card to remain under 80 Degrees C on the GPU temperature. Now if it does reach that 80 degrees, no worries as the card will not overheat, however, it will start to down-throttle. We emulated that in the temperature test that you have been able to read. If you have poor but a little ventilation the card sticks at 80 Degrees C under load.

Surprisingly, the overall performance was more or less similar to the reference product. Sometimes a little less due to due to down-throttling of the GPU as we did not give this card much ventilation but overall, it's as fast as reference and heck in some cases was even a tiny bit faster. So the performance remains to be very acceptable. Sure, this is entry-level stuff and not a 60FPS/Full HD product, but they are easy to use cards alright -- just pop them in, install a driver and you're good to go. Currently, pricing is sitting at a 180 USD/EUR marker. The 1080P resolution is the maximum domain of the focus for products like tested today, WQHD not so much obviously. The 4 GB of graphics memory does make a lot of sense for this product.  I stated this in previous reviews, the GeForce GTX 1650 overall is easy to use the drop-in product. This card is very handy for entry-level builds with decent enough 1080p performance for most games in combination with the need for silence. Although a dying breed with smart-TVs, it's an excellent HTPC card really (at least for decoding), then again so is any modern APU which comes with included CPU cores at the sole price of this graphics card. 

Aesthetics

For a passively cooled product with a huge cooling block slapped on top of the GPU, we can't complain really. Sure it looks a little out of the ordinary, but the target demographic that purchases this product likely is not interested in how it looks. This card for example would be an excellent solution in a HTPC build that needs to be silent. While the looks always remain trivial, it is looking totally fine as far as I am concerned.

Cooling & acoustic levels

With very little airflow, the card runs roughly 80 Degrees C and starts to throttle. Give it a little ventilation in the chassis and you will be hard-pressed to see it passing that 80C degree. The card itself is inaudible, your airflow created, however, will make some noise. So it is but subjective to give this a rating.  There was not any audible coil noise heard either.

Concluding

We think the Palit KalmX works well, it is inaudible and performs nicely. The one thing you'll need to give it (if you want to game on it) is to give it a notch of airflow. That is easily accomplished in any modern age chassis as there already is an air intake and exhaust. The card itself is 100% inaudible which is great. Reality also dictates that 98% of the actively cooled cards available all also are passive up-to a GPU temperature of 60 Degrees C. And once you go above that threshold, on AIB card some cooling kicks in (which lately has been very silent as well). So with that in mind the KalmX seems to have a bit of a limited target demographic. However, in simple PCs or a HTPC the product can rule as hey, it really doesn't make any noise. It is a fun 1080P range card that can deal with modern games.

We really cannot complain as to what Palit is trying to deliver here. However, the culprit is the amount of money that NVIDIA wants for this GPU, adding to the bill of manufacturing. We had hoped roughly 150 bucks, but currently, we spot the card listed at 180 EUR here in the EU. Whether or not you find it worth the money is for you to decide. All in all, it's a funky little card with tweaking potential as well. It might have a limited audience but we see very little wrong with it, aside from the price level the 1650 cards sit in. 

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