Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of ATITool, AMD GPU Clock Tool and our benchmarking suite.



The final overclocks of our card are 837 MHz Core (8 % overclock) and 1161 MHz Memory (3 % overclock). Personally I did not expect any overclock at all from a passively cooled card. Especially the GPU overclock is very nice and shows that there is some cooling potential left in this card. The memory overclock is limited by the memory cooling construction which is just a sheet of metal acting as heatspreader. We did not use any fan blowing on the cooler for our testing. With a fan or excellent airflow in the case you can probably get higher overclocks.


When I first saw those temperatures I couldn't believe them to be true for this completely fanless card. Measuring the surfaces with a thermometer confirmed the numbers though; the heatsinks get just warm even during load. We tested with the system in a case, fully closed, only fans are in the PSU and the CPU cooler, no case fans.
What is kinda funny is that the AMD reference design which uses an active cooler reaches load temperatures of 90°C and the fanless cooler of the SCS3 card runs much cooler and quieter than that.