Quote from: Wha on January 19, 2021, 21:32:27
It is NOT passively cooled. This is a RACK card... The fans are just placed elsewhere within the server chassis.
I believe Nvidia refers to such cards as passively cooled as well. After all, there is no active cooling on the card itself. The server as a whole is not passively cooled. But the card itself is. Passive doesn't mean that there is no forced airflow. It means that the object in question isn't moving heat by force. It sits passively in its environment. Often, it's the presence of such airflow that allows you to use a passive solution. It would be like claiming that a passively cooled computer isn't really passively cooled if it's placed in an air-conditioned room.
Nothing is stopping you from installing that card in a desktop. Of course, it's up to you to ensure that the heat gets removed. And doing that without forced airflow is not going to be easy. Convection sucks.