PowerColor SCS3 HD6850 1GB Pro Reviews

The PowerColor Radeon SCS3 HD6850 1GB GDDR5 is a unique card with potentially excellent performance, but its size, price, and limitations make it appropriate for only a very limited few.

For its market niche the SCS3 is an unmitigated success but its value for people who don’t absolutely want a passive card is dubious at best. Indeed, we can’t really consider this a “silent” GPU per se since there needs to be a fan operating somewhere within your enclosure to supply the heatsink with the airflow it so desperately needs. But in our opinion, PowerColor has designed a passive card that can pump out the framerates without featuring a steep admission price. That alone is a worthy accomplishment.

PowerColor's HD 6850 SCS 3 successfully establishes itself as the fastest passively cooled graphics card on the market. If you are on the never-ending quest for a low-noise PC and you won't accept a low-noise graphics card, then the PowerColor HD 6850 SCS3 is made for you. It offers the same performance characteristics as the AMD HD 6850 reference design, which means it will run all games fine at resolutions up to 1920x1200, yet emit zero noise, even when fully loaded. If you have a case with decent airflow, you could even overclock the card some more; we were able to boost GPU clock by 20% - as long as the card does not overheat. Thanks to AMD's temperature protection the card will drop down to reduced clock speeds as soon as it senses an overheat condition above 100°C.