Read more.Firm says you will now be able to “play hard, play quiet”.
Read more.Firm says you will now be able to “play hard, play quiet”.
Typo?
"This is a very powerful silent graphics card but compared to the standard AMD Radeon HD 7870 the core clock has been turned down,"
Shouldn't that read 7850?
Anyways, nice to see someone trying something different with these cards, sounds like this is pretty much the limit that passive can be applied to the 7 series range and no higher.
Roll on the 8 series!
mtyson (09-05-2013)
Nice. Will be watching this with interest. If all is good with it, my passively cooled PC could be having an upgrade soon.
Nice to see a fanless 7850. However I'm going to wait for a fanless 8850 - or something like that.
BTW according to the product page of the PowerColor SCS3 HD7850 and AMD Radeon HD 7850, the PowerColor SCS3 7850 is using stock clocks, ie 860MHz core and 1200MHz memory, so the core clock is 15% lower compared to the PowerColor PCS+ HD7850 but not the reference 7850.PowerColor has pre-set the GPU clock core speed to 850MHz compared with the AMD reference design... which runs at 1GHz.
Last edited by D1DM; 09-05-2013 at 09:31 PM.
Passive cooling on high end ATi cards is not a good idea.
I remember the passive Gigabyte HD4850. It was silent but was so damn hot that you needed two 12cm case fans to keep it cool. Defeated the whole purpose of being silent
Hopefully this will spur other partners into making more passively cooled higher end cards.
The graphics is the loudest part of my rig atm and its quite off putting so something passive would be awesome
I don't trust passively cooled graphics cards or power supply's, theres always that fear they're going to overheat
Can't wait to see a full review of this.
As D1DM mentioned though, the base core clock is definitely 1000Mhz. Mine's an OCed MSI version of the 7850 and it's only running at 900Mhz. I checked up on the stock core clock and it's at 860Mhz, not sure why PowerColor bothered to underclock it by 10Mhz, I really doubt it makes much difference in terms of temps.
Bad time to launch these cards with passive coolers, they should really be doing this during the winter season
I actually had one of those and with just one 120mm case fan it was more than ok. Was actually my fourth silent card in a row (MX440, 7300GT, 8600GT, then the HD4850) and always ran with the same case fan. Yes, it was HOT, but never too hot that my PC froze or rebooted itself in panic.
On this case however, I'm not sure if the 7850 will be so reliable when passively cooled, after all it's a 130w part instead of the 110w of the 4850. That's almost a 20% increase in TDP.
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