A little birdie recently handed us some photos of PowerColor's upcoming passively cooled Radeon X1950PRO and X1950XT. It could well be the fastest passively cooled graphic card on the market and if you like silent computing, this is definitely your thing.

These cards are said to be ready sometime in Q1 of next year and should only cost $10 USD more than the regular active cooling versions. What's interesting is that our source is claiming that their passive cooled made by Arctic Cooling should operating at a cooler temperature compared to the default stock ATI cooler, which uses active fan cooling. The operating temperature should be around 63c while the reference ATI cooler is closer to 67c.

The cooler will come with a total of four heatpipes and it was good news to hear that even the voltage regulators and memory modules will be cooled, too. It will be interesting to see how well these cards OC but if the claimed temperatures are indeed true, overclocking shouldn't be an issue.

So, is this the future of the graphics cards? Massive passive cooling devices with huge amounts of heatpipes? Silence sounds good to us, no pun intended!