Passively cooled components are becoming ever more in demand these days as people are looking for quiet solutions that are still high performance. Recently we took a look at one of those as we reviewed Powercolor’s HD 7850 SCS3 passively cooled graphics card and if you haven’t already seen that then we encourage you to check that review out here. However, we had some feedback about the product with readers and Powercolor themselves enquiring whether we could test it with fans to show how effective the heatsink design really is. Today we are going to do exactly that as we put the PowerColor HD 7850 SCS3 through its “thermal paces” in passive mode, with a 120mm fan and with a 140mm fan. We will be using a Prolimatech Vortex 12 Blue LED Fan at 1200RPM for the 120mm fan test and a Noctua NF-A14 ULN fan at 800RPM for the 140mm fan test. This way we have high performance fans but tamed at an RPM that most users would still find very quiet or near-silent which is what you will really want if you’ve bought a passive graphics card and just want to give it a little extra “helping hand” with airflow. But without any further ado let us proceed and take a look at the temperature and noise results!



Link: eTeknix