Apparently, BFG has released a passively cooled 9800 GT card to US online retailers without officially announcing its shipment.
According to TechPowerUp, both Newegg.com and Directron.com both list BFG's passively cooled 9800GT graphics card. Now the card has appeared on BFG's site, listed as the GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB PCIe with TermoIntelligece Passive Cooling solution. The board is an impressive sight, bearing no mounted fan, but rather a quad heat pipe cooler mounted on top of the processor like some kind of brain eating alien. The card features a core clock of 600 MHz, a shader clock of 1500 MHz, and supports shader model 4.0. The card's texture fill rate clocks in around 33.6 billion/sec. with stream processors at 112.
Additionally, the BFG Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB offers 512 MB (duh!) of GDDR3 video memory clocking at 1800 MHz. The card also features a 256-bit memory interface and a bandwidth of 57.6 GB/sec. The card supports the PCI Express 2.0 slot, but the specs show that it will also run on PCI Express x16 slot. It also requires two additional vacant slots above the PCI-E slot, as it physically takes up three slots. The target PC will need a 425W PCI Express-compliant system power supply with a combined 12V current rating of 28A or more (Minimum system power requirement based on a PC configured with an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor).
Newegg's website lists BFG's card as BFGE98512GTHE, selling for $159.99. The card comes packed with a free copy of Call of Duty: World at War, and also includes a DVI to VGA adapter, a HDTV (component) breakout cable, a dual 4-pin Molex to single 6-pin PCI Express power adapter and the driver disk. The card supports DirectX 10, OpenGL 2.1, SLI, and features two DVI-I ports and HDTV+S-Video Out ports. The card can output resolutions up to 2560 x 1600.
