Passive coolers are hard to make for cards of the mainstream and above market segments, but it looks like Gigabyte managed to do something of the sort to a certain HD 6000 series board anyway.
There is more than one reason why passively-cooled graphics cards are favored by the consumer base, even though they are, commonly, more expensive than air-cooled ones.
One reason is because, even though their price is higher, the power efficiency benefits make up for the price difference.
Also, the fact that they lack fans means they produce no noise during operation, which is an added boon, particularly for multimedia systems.
A third reason, though less common, is that, for reasonably strong cards, if such a design can be implemented successfully, overclocking becomes more interesting.
More specifically, overclockers can make some customizations of their own and strap some fans on top of the massive fin arrays, even though this wasn't in the original plan.
This will significantly boost cooling effectiveness even further, obviously, so tweaks to clocks will be safer to implement.
The AMD Radeon HD 6770 is the video card model that got equipped with a cooling solution just a short time ago.
Described in detail here, it is, supposedly, now selling on the Japanese market, complete with the extra heatsink on top.
For those that want a reminder, the board supports HDMI 1.4a and Blu-ray 3D playback, plus EyeFinity (multi-display) via Dual-link DVI-I, HDMI and Displayport.
Also, the GPU works at 850 MHz, while the 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM has a frequency of 4,800 MHz and a bus of 128 bits.
The newcomer bears the name of GV-R677SL-1GD and sells for about 15,000 yen (roughly $185). Users will have to make sure their cases can fit the newcomer, however, since that heatsink on top isn't exactly going to get along well with thin PC cases.
