14 DAY TRIAL // PowerColor has been teasing us with pictures of its passively cooled SCS3 Radeon HD 6850 graphics card for more than six months now, and it finally seems that the company is getting ready to launch this new solution into the wild.
The delays were most probably caused by design issues that came to light during the company's internal trials, as the card has undergone numerous revisions until it reached its current form.
According to VR-Zone, most of the work was focused on tweaking the components layout on the PCB to improve the thermal characteristics of the card.
We don't have any specific info regarding the changes made by PowerColor, but passively cooling a graphics card which has a load TDP of 127W certainly isn't an easy task.
Apart from the PCB, the cooling system also seems to feature some minor modifications, although the basic idea remains the same.
Five heatpipes, probably made out of anodized copper, draw the heat away from the core and into an aluminum heatsink that wraps the cards in a L-shape manner, taking advantage of the extra space that is usually available between the top of the graphics card and the chassis' side panel.
No details regarding the operating frequencies of PowerColor's creation are available at this time, but the stock version of the Radeon HD 6850 has its GPU clocked at 775MHz while the GDDR5 memory runs at 1GHz (4GHz effective).
However, it is highly possible that PowerColor might choose to drop these frequencies a bit in order to decrease the power consumption of the card, which should make it better suited for a passive cooler design.
As far as the available video connectors are concerned, the SCS3 HD 6850 will feature dual DVI ports, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, together with EyeFinity support.
The release date of the PowerColor SCS3 Radeon HD 6850 is not yet known.