1.29.2025

15-year-old fanless GPU going strong




"PowerColor did this to create a silent gaming machine. There's not one single fan located on the HD 6850 SCS3. What you will find instead is a huge heatsink that wraps around the PCB. Five heat pipes take the heat generated by the main GPU chip to the expansive fin array. There's a secondary heatsink attached to the rear of the GPU, which one could mistake as an early attempt to create a backplate. Every memory module has a micro heatsink of sorts.

Configured "low", the game ran at sub 20 FPS at 720p. Not a great turnout, but considering this card is numerous generations back, has just 1 GB of VRAM, and Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't even conceived at the time, it's not terrible. Then you have games such as Terraira, CS: GO, and Fortnite, which are still being updated and played today. They tax the GPU less and run well enough at higher resolutions."

Source: XDA