Yeah, admittedly I am a little fascinated they can run passively even though base and boost clock run on average about 10% lower.

Yeah, me too... does that mean next mid range cards will run passive? 😀 j/k But yeah, still fancy passively cooled low end GPUs for HTPCs and basic gaming rigs

hang on hang on hang on...... what scam is pny pulling here, those cards will go nuclear. I guess these are to be used in high airflow servers.

Astyanax:

hang on hang on hang on...... what scam is pny pulling here, those cards will go nuclear. I guess these are to be used in high airflow servers.

Exactly, in servers all are cooled this way. Use of fans inside rack on graphics/compute card is waste of space that can be used by bigger heatsink.

Uh.... I'm not convinced these are meant to be passively cooled. GPUs like this are usually found in server racks, where they'll be cooled by the array of fans pushing air through the chassis from the front. I'm quite confident these GPUs will be unusable in a matter of minutes if you put them in just any PC. Beefy Quadro/Tesla/Firepro GPUs without fans are not unhead of. For such models, a fan is only complicating airflow and reducing total cooling capacity, when put in the appropriate chassis.

It need zillion of noisy small fans in case, why these servers has to be locked somewhere far from people.. and its always punishment for technician to do something with them physically.. Personally always hated such sort of hardware.. its for big evil companies 🙂