Passive Cooling Works On GeForce GTX 750 Ti
For some reason, naked cards make me want to customize. If you can get motivated to enlarge this board's screw holes on your own (really, it's not a difficult task), then you're able to attach any heat sink with a hole distance of 43 mm. In essence, that's coolers compatible with AMD's Radeon HD 7700 family.
You might not think that this project is worthwhile to you, since existing partner cards run cool and quiet already. That's fair enough. But this is about cooling GM107 with no moving parts.
We can only concede that GPU Boost and its associated mechanisms are great for controlling the thermals on passively-cooled cards, even if that's not what it's meant for.
The technology works almost perfectly though, without much performance hit. It's also better about preventing the panic attacks triggered by passively-cooled Radeon cards in fanless cases. We've seen those boards crest 100 degrees, which is very dangerous.
Wrapping Up
We plan to continue tinkering, ensuring that any heat sink we experiment with has to at least be rated for 60 W and support a 43 mm screw pattern. If you're willing to follow in our footsteps, you'll end up with a nice, silent, and most important, fairly high-performance card. The GeForce GTX 750 Ti is typically a little slower than AMD's Radeon HD 7850. But that Pitcairn-based board can't be cooled passively.