Heaven is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items.
Good reference performance is followed through in Heaven 3.0 where the SCS3 matches both other 7850’s in the chart.
I would struggle to get used to a totally silent PC. I’m so used to the whirring off the fans that I don’t even notice them.
Fans are required? Tell that to my Nofan-cooled, fanless PSU, FT02 system which has no fans at all apart from those on my Geforce 660 Ti. How about putting the card in a rotated case like the Silverstone FT02 and make use of the fact that heat rises? It seems to me that Powercolor have done themselves a disservice by limiting themselves to two slots: as a specialist card, I don’t think anyone would blink if it took up 3 or even 4 slots.
Your benchmarks indicate that this card gives a decent gaming performance at 1080p and as such would be a shoe-in if I weren’t looking to move to 4K. Here’s hoping for a fanless Titan.
Just so you realise something…
Heat does generally rise, but in a small environment like a computer case, with any airflow, it is not going to take its natural course. Maybe If there is no fan at all, but even then it’ll just eventually heat up the whole area since there wont be any flow to move the heat out.
That’s why there are vents, just like you have on cards with blower fans. See my build log at http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1740852 for my complete system.