“We spoke in our introduction of the pitfalls of creating a passively cooled high-end board, and the largest of those pitfalls is, of course, heat output. Which brings us to the monster of a heatsink we have before us – This thing is huge! The solution employed by PowerColor is generally based around Arctic Cooling’s Accelero S2 cooler, and uses quad heat pipes to pull heat from the GPU away from the core, where it is dissipated by the large surface area and fins of the heat sink via cold air moving through the case (thus assuming reasonable ventilation in your chassis of course). The memory on the board also finds itself equipped with heat sinks to pull heat away from the RAM, where once again it is moved away by those thirty-one fins.”Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:
- ATI Radeon X1950 GT & Windows Vista – Not Friends Yet? @ TechARP
- Sapphire and HIS Radeon X1950PRO: Revisiting AGP Part 2 @ HW Upgrade
- NVIDIA BIOS Editor (NiBiTor) v3.3 Released… @ MVKTech
- Water-Cooled X2900 XTX Card @ VR-Zone
- NVIDIA Upcoming Mobile G80 GPUs @ VR-Zone
- EVGA 8800GTS 320MB Superclocked Videocard Review @ HardwareLogic
- ASUS AquaTank 8800GTX @ t-break
- FOXCONN 8800GTS 320mb: OverClocking Edition @ Bjorn3D
- Inno3D GeForce 7900GS 256MB IChiLL Accelero S1M Graphics Card @ TweakTown
- Foxconn 8800 GTS 320MB Overclocked @ I4U
Run quietly, and carry a big heatsink

The PowerColour Radeon X1950 Pro SCS3 is well named when referred to as the Silent Edition. The huge passive heatsink is larger than the actual card, and provides enough surface area to outperform the active cooling solution on an ASUS EAX1950 Pro. Elite Bastards tried it out on some of the newer games, including the newly available S.T.A.L.K.E.R., so you can get an idea how that game will perform on a system based around a X1950 Pro.