Although PowerColor has become synonymous with video cards and is a dominant presence in Europe and Asia, the name has yet to take a strong foothold here in North America. While PowerColor hasn't meandered into video card obscurity like some other manufacturers, say with the likes of Abit or Gigabyte, they aren't as ubiquitous as say, XFX and BFG have become for the NVIDIA side here. Instead PowerColor has opted for being known as the affordable video card manufacturer. To stretch that premise a little thinner, they have also been known in the past to release the occasional must have value card for its cost to performance ratio. - NeoSeeker

PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO SCS3 Edition Review

Now, it seems worthwhile to determine whether or not PowerColor has been flying under the radar with their cards, quietly out performing the other brands so to speak. The PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO SCS3 is one of their newest products and it comes out on the near the eve of the ATI R600 release. Mere months away from the rumored R600 GPU launch, PowerColor decided to target a different market with their new card. Staying decidedly with Radeons through the years, PowerColors only real radical change with this card is that it comes with a silent cooling system.

A couple of the weeks ago, we reviewed another RV570 card, the ASUS Extreme AX1950 PRO graphics card. And while ASUS chose an alternative cooling configuration from the reference design sought out by ATI, PowerColor really veered off from conventional course. The SCS3, a third revision of the Silent Cooling System, is actually provided by Arctic Cooling as it's marked on the core unit with a large Arctic Cooling logo. This silent cooler is vastly different in design to the ones we've seen from Gigabyte and other manufacturers. The design is really very simple and lightweight, despite the look and size of it.

Originally I thought the card could barely manage to sneak into a case as a single slot design, but it doesn't seem possible due to its enormous cooler design. Although If you were to put another card in the secondary slot, it would probably fit. But there wouldn't be any room for the Radeon X1950 heatsink to breath. Add in the fact that PowerColor included a secondary exhaust backplate to be mounted in the second slot, I would have to classify this card as a dual slotter. The exhaust backplate is a little weird as an addition, considering this card doesn't even have a fan to push the hot air out.

Underneath the heatsink is a RV570 core and 256MB of memory. The speeds that PowerColor chose are the stock speeds set by ATI. The core clock speed is set at 575MHz and the memory clock is 1.38GHz effective which is connected across a 256-bit bus. So in this case, these parts are exactly the same as if you were buying a stock ATI instead of PowerColor, an important point since some silent edition cards are actually underclocked due to the lower performing heatsinks. The features on this card are pretty standard. Some non standard differences would be the internal CrossFire and HDCP compatibility.

The PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO has been in limited release in Taiwan for a little while now and should hit North America shortly, if it hasn't already. With the SCS3 silent cooling version of the Radeon X1950, PowerColor has given up some features and added in some new ones in place of them. One thing I haven't mentioned about the SCS3 is the price, ringing in with a suggested retail of $250. So with the non-passive PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO Extreme costing in and around $220, you will be gaining silence in place of better performance, and a slightly lower cost if you decide to go passive.

While the NVIDIA cards in the same price range slightly outperform it overall, the SCS3 maintains a pretty steady score throughout all of the benchmarking. So given that it's a steady performer, there are the other factors to take into consideration. The three major are lower power consumption, silent cooling conduction and the card cost, all of which give the PowerColor an overall positive disposition. If you care about system noise, and are looking to get a midrange card, the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO SCS3 is a choice worthy of any gamer or HTPC enthusiast.