For some years now, if you wanted high-end graphics performance you usually had to put up with a whiney GPU cooler, or add your own water cooling to reduce noise levels. Passive cooling and power 3D acceleration haven't gone together since the days when Matrox was still producing credible consumer graphics cards, back in the 20th century. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to produce a fast graphics card without fan cooling, and XFX hopes to show you how. The Extreme Edition Passive is based on the GeForce 7950 GT, which is now replacing the GeForce 7900 GT, but partners it with a heatpipe based passive cooling system rather than the conventional fan cooling. - Hexus

XFX GeForce 7950 GT HDCP Extreme Edition Review

Despite its passive cooling, the XFX still has room for slightly improved clocks over a standard GeForce 7950 GT. Instead of running its core at 550MHz, the XFX bumps this up a tad to 570MHz, and the memory is marginally faster at 1460MHz effectively rather than 1400MHz. Otherwise, the GeForce 7950 GT is a full 24-pipe G71, so isn't that far behind the GTX models in raw specification apart from clock speed. It's also a fair bit ahead of the GeForce 7900 GT, too, so we would expect it to perform noticeably better too. You get a healthy 512MB of GDDR3, so here again this card is essentially a GTX running at lower clocks.

The XFX GeForce 7950 GT Extreme Edition delivers precisely what you'd expect for a GeForce 7950 GT with slightly increased core and memory clocks. It's a bit more expensive than other pre-overclocked GeForce 7950 GT's, and you can pick up stock boards for over £30 less. But the passive cooling puts this card in a different league as well. If you want this level of performance in a card which doesn't make a whisper, the XFX certainly delivers as specified, and you could put two together in SLI for monster frames per second without the noise. So quite value you can't deny when going for a noiseless system.

Around £70 more will get you an ATI Radeon X1900 XT, which is noticeably faster in many games, but won't be as quiet, or take away £40 and purchase the 256MB variant. Again, though, if silence is important and you need a high performance card to go with it, there's not much better. So two thumbs up for the GeForce 7950 GT Extreme Edition, as well as two dewclaws for the box art.