We may still be in limbo when it comes to next-gen graphics cards, but ASRock just launched a couple of interesting AMD GPUs. The ASRock RX 7900 XTX Passive and the RX 7900 XT Passive are two of AMD’s most powerful consumer graphics cards, but this time around, they’re completely fanless. That’s right — without an active cooling solution, these cards rely entirely on passive cooling.
At a glance, no one would’ve said that the cards in question are part of AMD’s RX 7000 series. After all, the RX 7900 XTX normally features three fans, but this one comes with zero, and it’s also significantly thinner than ASRock’s other versions of the RX 7900 XTX. Both cards are now just dual-slot, and they’re both shorter and thinner than their air-cooled counterparts.
The GPUs come with a grooved vapor chamber heatsink, made to move heat from the card to the aluminum cooling fins. The heatsink stretches across the GPU die, the memory, and the voltage regulator module (VRM), which should translate to a solid cooling solution even despite the lack of fans. The 12V-2×6 power connector has been placed right at the edge of the printed circuit board (PCB), making cable management simpler.
ASRock describes the GPUs as “multi-cards for accelerate computing,” but they do have slightly lower specs than their overclocked versions; no surprise, given the passive cooling. The RX 7900 XTX Passive has a boost clock of 2.5GHz, which is the same as the ASRock RX 7900 XTX 24GB, but a mere 80MHz less than the Taichi OC version of the card. It’s not a big trade-off, and the VRAM and the bus width stayed the same in both GPUs.
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It’s unclear when ASRock’s Passive GPUs will hit the shelves, and we’re not sure how much they’re going to cost. Regardless, they’re unlikely to be of interest to most people. A quiet GPU sure is nice to have, but the cooling could prove tricky outside of some very specific settings.
Fanless cards are rare for gamers, but they’re not unusual in settings that need higher performance, such as AI workloads. These cards are likely to end up in multi-GPU solutions, such as inside a server chassis. That way, they’ll still receive plenty of cooling and remain stable. In a gaming chassis, a card with a 355-watt TDP (which is what the 7900 XTX sports) would most likely struggle to keep cool.
