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Review: PowerColor SCS3 HD7850

by Parm Mann on 17 May 2013, 15:00

Tags: PowerColor (6150.TWO)

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Power Consumption and Temperature

That's interesting, and somewhat unusual. AMD's reference Radeon HD 7850 is a fairly lightweight design, with system-wide power consumption measured as 42 watts when idle and 155 watts when playing Far Cry 3. PowerColor's card should report in with very similar numbers, but that isn't the case; we found that idle and under-load power draw went up by as much as 70 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively.

We reached out to PowerColor to find out what might be causing the above-average power consumption, and had the following response: "not all GPUs are equal, some have higher leakage than others, specialy at higher board temperatures the leakage turns bigger."

Temperature, as expected, is the card's biggest concern. In our Corsair Graphite 600T chassis (with fans enabled) we found that the SCS3 HD7850 would idle at 43ºC and hit a toasty 95ºC under load. The numbers are higher than we'd like for a modern mid-range GPU, and these readings suggest that running in a completely passive environment will be too big a challenge. Let's put that theory to the test.