MSI passively cools dual RV630XT card

MSI FIRED ON all cylinders for this Computex show, and if we could use one word to describe this year's stand, it would be passive.

The company wants to push out small and tiny fans from its products, so motherboards are getting a roller-coaster heatpiped treatment, while most of the low-end and mainstream products received a classical heatpipe cooling design.

RV630XT is not on the market yet, but it should prove to be an interesting alternative to Nvidia's 8600 series

For starters, the guys'n'gals designed passively cooled Radeon HD2600XT - this board works at full 800 MHz for the GPU and 1.1 GHz DDR for the GDDR-4 memory, so no concessions were given here. There is even some overclocking functionality enabled, since ATi's late 65nm RV630XT chip isn't consuming much power. We're talking about mid-40 Watt figures for the complete board.

Unlike previous iterations of this engineering excercise, this one looks like a viable concept. Fans aren't present, clocks are the same as single-GPU card

Low power consumption helped MSI guys to recreate Geminium concept, this time with two RV630XT chips. Board eats up only 85+ Watts, and the board was given a 6-pin PCIe power connector just to keep the chips running at a default clock. With 150W to play with (75W from the motherboard, 75W from PEG connector), this board could even endure some overclocking. So far, we're more worried about the drivers. Hardware works anyways. µ