PowerColor 7850 SCS3 Passive Review

Typically when overclocking cards I primarily rely on the stock cooler to keep things cool when pushing the card to its limits, however this time round I need to ensure that some good airflow is given to the card otherwise soon enough the core will become way too hot to handle and failure will be imminent. Whilst I am overclocking this car, I do strongly recommend that if you are running a passive card, you don’t really want to overclock it as, in reality, they’re not built for this purpose.

Surprisingly, after a bit of a struggle to get the GPU core off the starting blocks and optimising the airflow around the heat sink, a core clock speed of 1060MHz was reached, giving an impressive 200MHz overclock – up ~23% from stock. The memory similarly saw a good gain, up 125MHz to 1325MHz – a gain of just over 10%.

With the additional cooling applied to the card and the overclock applied, a gain of around 18% in performance is to be found bringing up the 3DMark score from 1700 to 2010. As mentioned above though, overclocking a passive card is not recommended due to the reduced airflow that these cards typically operate under.