225 watts and passive cooling?
How can this be?
Keeping pace with Nvidia in the GPU wars, Advanced Micro Devices has not only launched its "Lisbon" Opteron 4100 processors but also released the embedded versions of its "Cypress" family of GPUs, a counterpunch to Nvidia's "Fermi" chips used in its Tesla embedded GPUs. The Cypress GPUs already made their way into the ATI …
"""225 watts and passive cooling? How can this be?"""
The heatsink on that monster looks like it's at least twice the size of a 1U passive CPU heatsink, which generally do 100W with ease. Remember that it's a passive heatsink which will be directly in front of a bank of double stacked 10k+ rpm 40mm fans, so it's not passive in the sense of desktop passive cooling. And it won't be quiet.
Server cases have internal fans that direct airflow efficiently. These cards have heatsinks designed to effeciently sit in that airflow channel, so it is like having a large fan strapped on to their heatsinks. Servers are quite densely packed and don't have "pretty" airchannel spoilers such as glowing fans and perforations all over the case.
Your average $20-$45 pc case will not be fitting for this combo.
So far the only thing halfway respectable for this would be an ANTEC-900 case.
I was a victim of the above thinking. I thought I could just get by with wonderful power supply but an el cheapo case and boy my pc rebooted several times due to heat issues even though I had 5 fans in it. threw out the case and bought the antec 900 and never looked back.