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.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• CrossFire Bridge
• DVI to Analog VGA Adapter
• Dirt 3 coupon

The Card

PowerColor is using a heatsink on the front and back of their card, as mentioned before, the card is fanless, so a big heatsink is needed.


The card requires three slots in your system. On the back of the HD 6850 SCS3 you will find an additional heatsink that might block installation on some motherboards that place the chipset very close to the PCIe slot. The card should fit fine on most boards, especially recent ones.


Display connectivity is two DVI ports, one full size HDMI port and one full size DisplayPort output. AMD's display output logic is clearly superior to what NVIDIA has to offer at this time. Board partners are free to combine several TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links) - and use them all at the same time.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU, too. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes HD audio and support for Blu-ray 3D movies. The DisplayPort interface is DisplayPort 1.2 compliant which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.


You may combine up to two HD 6850 cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration.


Pictured above are photos of the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.