Palit's GeForce GTX 750 Ti KalmX is the first completely fanless NVIDIA graphics card in a long time, and it comes with performance that doesn't suck. For years, NVIDIA hasn't allowed a vendor to come out with a completely passively cooled graphics card beyond the GeForce GT Series (the GT 640 being the latest). This particular move is only possible with NVIDIA's power-efficient Maxwell GPU architecture, which almost doubles efficiency compared to previous generations. So Palit's GeForce GTX 750 Ti KalmX is in a unique position to cater to media-PC users who want a completely quiet graphics card with some shading power, be it for games or more demanding video renderers, like madVR (which I highly recommend, by the way).
Our real-life performance testing shows the Palit KalmX to be roughly 4% slower than the GTX 750 Ti reference design when averaged over all our games. Palit did not overclock their card and is running reference clocks, so why the difference? Palit's fan-less design causes GPU temperatures to run higher than on actively cooled cards, which runs the board into NVIDIA Boost's temperature limit beyond which the driver will cut back the Boost clocks to avoid overheating. NVIDIA still guarantees that the card will never run below its base clock of 1200 MHz, so the technology is actually great for a passive card because it effectively ensures that overheating isn't possible, even with serious gaming in badly ventilated cases. It also ensures that performance is never crippled. NVIDIA's driver will step in to reduce clocks below base clock, down to idle clocks of around 135 MHz if need be, though, should GPU temperature rise beyond 95°C, but we never managed to push the card hard enough in our testing for clocks to drop below 1200 MHZ as the Maxwell GPU never produced enough heat, even while fully loaded. I would say the Palit GTX 750 Ti KalmX is fast enough for 1080p gaming with anti-aliasing turned off and some details settings reduced.
Palit's cooler does a fine job handling the card's very limited heat signature. We've seen extremely good power consumption numbers from all GTX 750 Ti cards and Palit's board is no exception. While our testing shows a tiny increase in non-gaming power states, the difference is not significant. My biggest issue with the cooler is that it is quite large, extending well beyond the card's top edge. This could make its installation in small form-factor cases difficult, which is probably the card's primary usage model. But it should work extremely well in an office PC that has been optimized for low noise and low power consumption in a normal-sized case.
Overclocking of our card worked extremely well despite the passive-cooling solution and can compete with "full" GTX 750 Ti cards any day. Our manual overclocking tests showed a real-life performance improvement of over 25%,which is truly impressive and could help improve framerates for 1080p gaming.
Unfortunately, Palit graphics cards are not available in the United States, a market the company left several years ago. We've found the card to be available in many stores across Europe, retailing for around €130, which we converted into US$180 for a comparison with our current USD prices of other graphics cards. The cheapest GTX 750 Ti is available online for €105 (US$140), which means Palit's card comes with a hefty US$40 price premium, a 20% hike. While I think the difference is quite big, Palit's unique product can help justify the cost. Users whose prerogative is low noise always have to pay price premiums, no matter what component they purchase, and with Palit being the company with the fastest passive NVIDIA graphics card on the market, I'm not surprised to see such a high price. Most other fan-cooled GTX 750 Ti cards are extremely quiet in idle, which should have them provide a similar acoustic experience if you are building an office- or media-PC for a standard video renderer, as they will always run idle clocks. If you plan on gaming or using custom video renderers, the actively cooled cards will spin up their fans, which could degrade your acoustic experience—a situation you will never run into with the Palit GTX 750 Ti KalmX. The fastest passive AMD graphics card, the PowerColor R9 270 SCS3, is roughly 35% faster, but compare it to the Palit GTX 750 Ti KalmX and it requires an external 6-pin power connector and three times as much power during media playback and two times as much during gaming. So the Palit GTX 750 Ti KalmX is the best and only choice you have if you must absolutely have a passive graphics card and want the most power-efficient approach to do so. It's the graphics card I'm using in my Media PC right now.