Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 6850 has been on the market for quite a while and we have seen many non-reference designs in the last months. However, all those used active cooling to keep the card cool. PowerColor's new HD 6850 SCS3 is the first HD 6850 that does away with the fan and uses an all passive cooling solution.



PowerColor has chosen to use a big triple slot heatsink on their card to manage the heat output of the card. In terms of performance characteristics nothing has changed, the card comes at AMD reference clock speeds. Price-wise, PowerColor is asking a $10 premium which seems quite reasonable considering the unique no-noise aspect of this product.