PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 Review - PAGE 2

A couple of the weeks ago, we reviewed another RV570 card, the Asus EAX Radeon X1950 Pro. And while Asus chose an alternative cooling configuration from the reference design sought out by ATI, PowerColor really veered off from conventional course. The SCS3, a third revision of the Silent Cooling System, is actually provided by Arctic Cooling as it's marked on the core unit with a large AC logo.  This silent cooler is vastly different in design to the ones we've seen from Gigabyte and other manufacturers. There are about 4 different pieces that make up the new SCS3. First the core unit which is mounted on top of the GPU core. From there, there are 4 copper heatpipes that are attached to an array of heatspreaders.



While the heatspreaders could pass as a car radiator, the third part of the design is a counterbalance plastic piece that keeps the HS from jostling around. The fourth part, the individual aluminum heatsinks for the RAM chips, are really separate from the HS but should be mentioned anyways. The design is really very simple and lightweight, despite the look and size of it. One small thing about the design I didn't quite like was that there isn't a balance on the left side of the card, so the HS fins will hit the S-video mounting block if you grab it firmly by one side. But that's a relatively minor issue since you'll hardly be handling this card (or any other) once installed.



Originally I thought the card could barely manage to sneak into a case as a single slot design, but it doesn't seem possible due to its enormous cooler design. Although If you were to put another card (maybe a sound card or some small expansion card) in the secondary PCI slot, it would probably fit. But there wouldn't be any room for the X1950 heatsink to breath. Add in the fact that PowerColor included a secondary exhaust backplate to be mounted in the second PCI slot, I would have to classify this card as a dual slotter. The exhaust backplate is a little weird as an addition, considering this card doesn't even have a fan to push the hot air out. I guess it can be used as extra protection as well.

 

Underneath the heatsink is a RV570 core and 256MB of RAM. The speeds that PowerColor chose are the stock speeds set by ATI. Core clock speed is set at 575MHz and the RAM clock is 690MHz (1.38MHz DDR) which is connected across a 256 bit bus. So in this case, these parts are exactly the same as if you were buying a stock ATI instead of PowerColor - an important point since some silent edition cards are actually underclocked due to the lower performing heatsinks.

The features on this card are pretty standard. There are all the standard issues such as Dual DVI ports, S-video connector and single PCI-E power connector. Some small non-standard differences would be the internal CrossFire connectors (double 12 bit instead of the standard single) and HDCP compatibility, which were also features on the Asus EAX X1950 Pro. While there wasn't a CrossFire adapter included with the package we got, there maybe an alternate package in coming time that will include it. Since the Dual CrossFire connectors and HDCP features are becoming almost standard these days on mid-range cards (they aren't even mentioned in the feature section on the exterior of the box), it's good to see that PowerColor didn't skimp in this area.