Reviews - PowerColor SCS3 HD7850

[HEXUS]

Passively-cooled Radeon HD 7850 under the spotlight.

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[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Its great to see Hexus looked at airflow considerations too.

It does make me wonder whether a relatively quiet active cooler would make more sense though.

[harryj1995]

If it requires good case airflow what's the point of being passive

[Willzzz]

Yeah, it's the same sort of logic that brought us electric cars.

[HalloweenJack]

Spark-Renault SRT_01E

[Pleiades]

I don't understand about the electric cars thing, pwease xplain :-)

[Terbinator]

The vicious circle of heat increasing power draw got me.

[Ulti]

It's a shame it runs so hot, with all that metal I would have thought that it would have ran cooler with the chassis fans.

I wonder how it would perform with a slim 80/92/120mm slow spinning fan.

[Myss_tree]

That power draw is huge over the other cards.
Thats a fair bit of bulk to on the top of the card.

[Omabytes]

I don't understand about the electric cars thing, pwease xplain :-)

I presume he's getting at the fact that to generate the electricity for an electric car you have to use fossil fuel anyway. Of course this doesn't really hold as an argument for several reasons. Firstly, you cut out a whole fuel transport system ie. tanker lorries to petrol stations. Also, emissions can be more easily controlled in a factory environment plus any emissions are outside of cities. And lastly, in hybrid cars it is more fuel efficient to produce electricity with the petrol and run the electric motors than to power the wheels directly. Counter intuitive I know but oh well.

I guess the reasoning with the card is for if you already have a decent case fan then this could sit in and not add to the noise. Might overload you're case fan though, 100oc is pretty toasty.

[wasabi]

Would be interesting to see what the temps are if the side of the case is left off (what I currently do with my 100 percent passive rig). Or if slightly underclocked.

[Liam-McShane]

If it requires good case airflow what's the point of being passive

Exactly, renders the whole thing pointless.

[s12]

I'm sorry hexus but as someone who is highly interested in buying this card I don't find this review very helpful.

You don't state ambient temperature, what speed the case fans were running at or if the hard drive bays were removed. This would have a massive impact on temperatures on a card like this.

The power consumption results are also highly unusual and find them very hard to believe tbh. Are you sure the test setups were the exact same and both the gpu + cpu were downclocked when the idle results were taken? Heck, even the titan, gtx 690 and 7990 consume less in idle.

[hackerDON]

No fan who will buy it it will get extremely hot will playing hungry games.

[loyal986]

Doesent bring the desiered point, it means less noise withought fan, but more noise with more case fans.

[minicale]

If it requires good case airflow what's the point of being passive

Because gpu fans are generally the noisiest fans in most peoples systems because changing them is not an easy task and generally voids the warranty but with case fans you can choose which you want and get quiet ones so with a passively cooled gpu your system would be quieter.