PowerColor passive HD3870 SCS3

A Closer Look

The base that makes contact with the GPU is made from Copper; all other parts are made from Aluminum which makes sense to keep weight and cost down. The thermal paste used is a very solid gum like substance which is extremely difficult to remove if you don't have a solvent cleaner like Arctic Silver Arcticlean. Even with Arcticlean it took me like 10 minutes to clean up the cooler base and GPU core.


The memory is cooled by this metal plate which is nothing more than a heatspreader. This is also the reason that the memory overclock is rather slim even though fast memory chips are used on the card.


This plastic pin which holds the voltage regulator heatsink in place is tall enough to provide a little support for one of the two heatsinks.


This card is compatible with CrossFire and CrossFireX once it is available. But given the three slot design it might be hard fitting four of these cards on one motherboard. What might be possible though is that you use one HD 3870 SCS3 and one reference design card, so there is less space needed but still a noise benefit for you.


The power connector is located in the normal location which makes it a bit difficult to work with the power cable. Plugging it in is not too hard; you just have to press the connector in. Removing is more difficult because you have to press down on the connector and there is very little space to squeeze in a finger between heatsink and plug and press down. It can be done though with the card installed but not as easy to do as when the heatsink wouldn't be there or had a little cutout.


The GDDR4 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4U52324QE-BC08. With 0.8 ns latency (= 1250 MHz) they should have some headroom left for overclocking which is limited by the memory cooling assembly.


As GPU the ATI RV670 is used which is made in a 55nm process at TSMC. The small black squares are in place to make sure the cooler can not move and chip the GPU silicon.