PowerColor HD 7850 SCS3 Review

Powercolor’s HD 7850 SCS3 currently retails for somewhere in the region of £165 or $195 USD. You can pick up many competing custom cooled HD 7850 graphics cards for around £135-145/$150-170 with the most affordable of those being models from MSI and Sapphire. Under load most of these competing graphics cards will offer up temperatures in the ballpark region of 65-75 degrees Celsius depending on your ambient temperature. We were seeing temperatures on the HD 7850 SCS3 of around 50-55 degrees at load with an extra fan. Therefore we can clearly see the advanced heatsink design on the Powercolor HD 7850 SCS3 allows it to cool much better than competing graphics cards and much quieter as it is optimised for low RPM fans and low airflow.

That said Powercolor’s HD 7850 SCS3 is already significantly more expensive than a “normal” HD 7850 to the tune of around 10-20%. Adding a fan is going to cost you more, though how much more depends on what fan you choose to use, and also you should consider if you have a spare 120mm fan already then it wouldn’t cost you anything at all. My main issue with this kind of solution is that Powercolor do not provide optional fan clips with the graphics card so you’ll need some kind of make-shift fan attachment solution which makes everything that more complex.

So at the end of all this you would get a HD 7850, cooled to excellent temperatures (much better than rival cards) even at the very low fan speeds we tested with but it will cost you more money and you’ll need to get creative with your fan-attachment skills (cable ties may work well). In reality because this is a passive graphics card from the start you also sacrifice a lot of the overclocking features and enthusiast extras (such as bolstered VRM and power phases) you’d get with other cards so anyone thinking that they could get this graphics card, attach an extra fan and have one of the best HD 7850s on the market is misguided.

If you want a stock HD 7850 that is ultra quiet then this could definitely be a good solution, through attaching the additional low RPM fan. Though it works out very costly and there are many better solutions I can think of – such as limiting the fan speed on a custom-cooled HD 7850 which would be both cheaper and more feasible. Even adding more case fans would probably be a more sensible overall solution. We will leave it up to the end user to make what they will of this. Sure it adds extra cooling performance, but would you be willing to pay the price premium for this complex solution?