Palit GeForce GTX 1650 KalmX Embraces Sound Of Silence With Passive Cooling
You are probably aware of the philosophical thought experiment that asks, 'If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?', and we are not here to provide an answer. However, we can say that spinning fans make noise. In search of silence, Palit opted to do away with them on its GeForce GTX 1650 KalmX graphics card.
The KalmX model ditches the traditional heatsink + fan + shroud assembly and goes the passive route with just the heatsink. Combined with the "advanced powerful Pascal architecture," the GeForce GTX 1650 KalmX offers up a silent gaming experience. That's wrong of course—the GeForce GTX 1650 is not a Pascal part, as Palit incorrectly states on the product page, but a Turing GPU.
Barring any electrical whine, however, Palit's claim of this card delivering a 0 decibel gaming environment should be accurate. Palit also correctly identifies the Turing architecture in its press release, so we won't dwell on the Pascal shout out on the product page (easy mistake to make, really). This card doesn't boast any dedicated hardware for real-time ray tracing or Tensor Cores, but the GPU is still Turing.
Palit is sticking to NVIDIA's reference specifications with this model rather than employing an factory overclock. That's the safer choice on a passively cooled graphics card—you're relying more heavily on your system's air flow to keep temps in check. To recap what those specs are, here's a look...
- GPU/Architecture: TU117 (Turing)
- CUDA Cores: 896
- Streaming Multiprocessors: 14
- Render Output Units: 32
- Texture Mapping Units: 56
- Process: 12 nanometers
- Base Clock: 1,485MHz
- Boost Clock: 1,665MHz
- Memory: 4GB GDDR5
- Memory Speed: 8Gbps
- Bus Width: 128-bit
- Memory Bandwidth: 128MB/s
- TDP: 75 watts
Bear in mind that this is the regular GeForce GTX 1650 and not a refreshed Super model. The GeForce GTX 1650 Super ups the ante with more CUDA cores (1,280), more SMs (20), more TMUs (80), faster GPU clocks (1,530MHz base, 1,725MHz boost), faster memory (12Gbps), and more memory bandwidth (192GB/s). It also has a higher TDP (100W), which would make it slightly less suitable for a passive cooling solution.
Palit doesn't say much about the cooler on its KalmX variant. However, we can see that this is a shortened, 2-slot graphics card (178 x 138 x 38 mm) with an aluminum finned block, and what appears to be a pair of heatpipes. As for output options, it sports an HDMI 2.0b port and two DisplayPort 1.4a connectors.
It's not clear when this card will be available or how much it will cost. As a point of reference, Palit's shortened GeForce GTX 1650 with a single fan cooling solution sells for around $219. Meanwhile, a similarly sized card from Zotac (also with a single fan) goes for around $150.
