PowerColor Radeon HD 7850 SCS3 review - Introduction

A mainstream GPU cooled passively

We test and review the PowerColor Radeon HD 7850 SCS3 today. This stock clocked Radeon HD 7850 is cooled passively, meaning it has no fans tool it down. That also means it's rather silent as it does not make any noise. But what about temperatures then you must be wondering ? Well, let's find out and test the cards with the hottest games like Company of Heroes 2, Battlefield 3, Metro last Light, Far Cry 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Hitman Absolution and many more.

As you guys know, the R7850/7870 products from AMD offer good value for money. AMD's partners are very savvy to release graphics cards based on these cute products as they perform well for the money, quite well actually. The 1GB versions you can spot for 150 EUR these days. For those that missed it or need a little extra information, two graphics cards have been released in the 7800 series. Pitcairn XT (GPU codename) is the AMD Radeon HD HD7870 - it comes with 20 Compute Units carrying 1280 Stream Processors, 80 texture units and 32 ROPs. The AMD reference core and memory frequencies clock in at an impressive 1000 MHz on the GPU and 1200MHz (4800MHz effective GDDR5) on the memory, this product is equipped with 2GB memory running over a 256-bit memory interface. AMD brands this product the "One GHz Edition" due to the reference clock frequency. This means that AMD's partners can release products clocked even higher. Pitcairn Pro is the GPU that empowers the Radeon HD 7850, it features 16 Compute Units, 1024 Stream (shader) Processors, 64 texture units and 32 ROPs. Its core and memory frequencies fall behind that of the 7870 but it is still clocked at a good 860 MHz core with 1.20GHz (4800 MHz effective) on the memory. Again, the memory is based on a 256-bit interface.

Tul aka PowerColor jumped the 7800 bandwagon as well with several models, and for this review we'll be looking at their Radeon HD 7850 SCS3 edition which comes with all passively cooled, and that means sheer silence, excellent stuff for the audiophiles amongst us, and obviously the sheer HTPC builders that need a little more boom boom pow in their build, inevitably to play a game or two on that rig as well.PowerColor uses a custom PCB and their SCS3 dual-slot cooler making the card very easy to install, chilled down very reasonably and sure, silent. The graphics card is equipped with one 6-pin PCIe power connector.The card comes factory clocked at 860 MHz.The memory is clocked at a 4800 MHz reference clock frequency, whuich is reference as well. Have a peek at the card, and then let's start up this review.