PowerColor's HD 7850 SCS3 is the dream of all low-noise fetishists. The card is completely passively cooled, which means that it will never produce any noise. Built on the foundation of AMD's Radeon HD 7850, it has enough gaming power for gaming at full HD, but we do recommend dropping AA levels or reducing details a bit for better playability in some games. PowerColor did not overclock their card, which makes sense as heat output will govern the viability of such a product. As a result, performance almost matches that of the HD 7850 reference design, with the exception of 2560x1600 gaming. At 2560x1600, the card's 1 GB VRAM will get overwhelmed with graphics data, causing severe performance drops. I, while some may cry out now, don't think of this as an issue. A HD 7850 class card is simply not made for full details gaming at 2560x1600, no matter how much memory you put on it. Getting rid of 1 GB of VRAM helped PowerColor keep the price of their card down while also reducing power consumption a bit, which takes some stress off the passive cooler. Reasonable choices in my opinion.
PowerColor's cooler does a good job at keeping the card cool, but its design requires some airflow in the case. This means that you cannot build a completely passive, noiseless system with the HD 7850 SCS3, but I don't think this is possible with any passive card of this performance class. The cooler is a bit large though, so it might not fit into all cases, or you could run into clearance issues with the CPU cooler, like in my case. I had to run the card in the second PCIe x16 slot that only supports operation at x8. Thanks to PCIe 3.0, the performance difference is negligible, but it's something to consider. Also, the cooler extends a bit beyond the top edge of the PCB, which could make installation in small cases difficult. Making a completely passive card is not easy, especially not in the HD 7850's performance class, so some compromises have to be made.
While it's not the primary goal of the product, overclocking worked very well with even the passive design. We reached clock speeds close to those of actively cooled cards, so you could squeeze a bit of extra performance out of the card if your case has some decent airflow. Memory overclocking was quite poor though, probably because PowerColor used Elpida memory chips instead of Samsung or Hynix ones, which overclock much better.
PowerColor expects a retail price $25 above that of the 1 GB HD 7850 reference design, which brings the price to around $195, a reasonable premium for such a noiseless card. You could, on the other hand, buy the GTX 660 that is about 20% faster for $200, and there are custom designs that are very quiet, but not noiseless.
PowerColor's HD 7850 SCS3 is the only card of its kind on the market, with no competition in sight, so I have to commend PowerColor for creating this option. There is simply no alternative if you want the ability to seriously game with absolutely no noise coming from the graphics card.