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.
For media PC users the card comes with a native HDMI output, which includes audio of course. A few months ago, AMD has introduced several video quality enhancement features in their Catalyst driver, which make this card a great choice for a quiet media PC system. The only issue could be limited space in smaller cases as this card requires three slots. A three slot design for this card seems justified, since the card reaches 100°C in a case with no case fans. While 100°C might sound like a lot, it is acceptable in my opinion, for a card like this.
Price-wise the card comes at a very reasonable $180, which is only a $10 price premium over other HD 6850 variants. PowerColor also includes a Dirt 3 full game coupon which helps to offset the cost of card a bit.