It takes courage to try passive cooling of a 127 W graphics processor. PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 sold the first one we have seen, have only covered with a heat sink. If the triple-slot cooler do its job, or Barts is simply too complex a GPU cool like this?

Passively-cooled mid-range graphics cards are now made to the status of endangered species. Their power and thus the heat, they kidnap is just too high. The attempt at a reasonably fast GPU fan to keep cool without two things: a sophisticated design and heatsink right environment. Almost unbelievably, PowerColor has not set the clock on his SCS3 HD6850 1GB card ever covered, and instead offers the power of a normal 6850 card (but no fan).

Knowing that the 960-shader core Barts suitable for 127 W, we were dying to find out how a heatsink alone was enough to keep the GPU cool. To reach this conclusion, we have not only benchmark the board in a series of games, but also in several cases examined to assess the viability in the wild. Except for an ultra-quiet fan mounted on the card, as compared to an active cooling things will change around.

Here’s a bit of a spoiler. In the summer, in the wrong context, this card runs the edge of disaster, and perhaps even exceed. Read on to find out how to avoid a meltdown. We will use against the usefulness of this card on all brands.