PowerColor has been using the SCS3 cooling system on a number of products before. When the Radeon HD 3870 was released they soon started working on their implementation of a completely passive cooled Radeon HD 3870. The final product is a blessing for all media PC owners or users who want to build a quiet PC. All other SCS3 powered cards use a cooler designed by Arctic Cooling, the Radeon HD 3870 SCS3 however does not. The card's clock speeds, memory configuration and the PCB design are exactly the same as the AMD reference design. So the only change other than packaging of course is that the SCS3 cooler has been mounted instead of the AMD reference cooler. - techPowerUp!

PowerColor Radeon HD 3870 SCS3 Graphics Preview

This is a typical PowerColor box which features a final fantasy type character on the front and detailed specifications in multiple languages on the back. The massive cooler covers both sides of the card which means it's a three slot design. This makes the card a bad candidate for CrossFire setups or small cases. The hole in the cooler is there to let the guys at the factory screw on the cooler. Also the two heatsinks are held in place only by the heatpipes which seems to be a quite durable but not unbreakable construction. We think it is safe to transport the case to and from LAN parties with the cooler installed.

The base that makes contact with the GPU is made from copper, with all other parts made from aluminum which makes sense to keep weight and cost down. The thermal paste used is a very solid gum like substance which is extremely difficult to remove if you don't have a solvent cleaner. The memory is cooled by this metal plate which is nothing more than a heatspreader. This is also the reason that the memory overclock is rather slim even though fast memory chips are used on the card. This card is compatible with CrossFire and CrossFireX once it is available, but it might be hard fitting four of these cards.

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used ATITool and some decent benchmarking suites. The final overclocks of our card are 837MHz core and 2322MHz memory. Personally we didn't expect any overclock at all from a passively cooled card. Especially the GPU overclock is very nice and shows that there is some cooling potential left in this card. The memory overclock is limited by the memory cooling construction which is just a sheet of metal acting as heatspreader. We did not use any fan blowing on the cooler for our testing. With a fan or excellent airflow in the case you can probably get higher overclocks.

PowerColor is offering their Radeon HD 3870 SCS3 edition card for a price of $269, which is about $20 more than a regular Radeon HD 3870 reference card. When we first heard about PowerColor creating a completely passive Radeon HD 3870 card we expected a card that was running extremely hot and needing excellent airflow in the case for proper operation. But apparently the SCS3 design of PowerColor does a great job reducing the card temperatures compared to the reference design. The passive cooler's temperatures are lower than the reference design with a fan, allowing even some mild overclocking on top.

Being completely noiseless this card is an excellent candidate for use in a media PC system that stands in your living room. Only the three slot design might limit the use since it will probably not fit your small form factor case. We also think it will be difficult finding a motherboard that has enough space for a CrossFire setup of these cards. With a price premium of only $20 over the reference design this card is really a no-brainer when you are looking for a Radeon HD 3870 card. The only exception being if you are really on a tight budget, don't care about noise or are going the CrossFire route.