This 15-year-old AMD Radeon GPU has no active cooling and can still play today’s games

It’s incredible to imagine a world where it was possible to purchase a mid-range GPU for less than $200, but that was the case back in 2010 — and still is for 2025, thanks to Intel. The AMD Radeon HD 6850 was a fairly powerful card for the time, supporting DirectX 11.2, built on a whopping 40nm process, and released on October 21, 2010. I still have one and it’s the mighty PowerColor HD 6850 SCS3. What’s so special about this HD 6850? There’s no fan. Everything, including the GPU, memory, and VRMs is cooled via a monstrous heatsink. It still works today and happens to play a bunch of modern titles without issue at 1080p.

AMD’s HD 6850 was a decent GPU

Solid mid-range performance

Whilst not the best-performing graphics card of its time, this HD 6850 was a great option for budget-friendly PC builds. Based on the Barts architecture, this Barts PRO GPU has 960 shading units, 48 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs. Just 1 GB of GDDR5 RAM is present for storing game data, running on a 256-bit memory interface. For clock speeds, we’re looking at 775 MHz with a maximum boost of 1,000 MHz. On the rear of the GPU are two DVI ports (don’t worry if you’ve not heard of this before), a single HDMI 1.3a port, and two mini-DisplayPort 1.1 connections.

A single 6-pin PCIe power connection is required to provide the card with enough power outside of what’s available through the motherboard PCI slot. Speaking of PCI, this is a generation 2.0 GPU and we’re already seeing new GPU launches aimed at PCIe 5.0. Launching for just $179, you could enjoy all the current games with decent visual settings and pleasant results. Performance wouldn’t blow anyone away, but it was more than enough for games such as Fallout 3 and Skyrim the following year. It’s also difficult to believe this was released just three years before Grand Theft Auto V.

No fans, no noise

Just one colossal heatsink

The PowerColor HD 6850 SCS3 is an absolute unit. Though it doesn’t quite match the size of today’s GPUs with their vast heatsinks and multi-fan setups, for a 2010 card with considerably less heat to deal with, it’s still one of the larger HD 6850 GPUs you could buy at the time. The reference TDP is just 127 W, which is around the same as most desktop-class CPUs of today. PowerColor ditched the two mini-DP ports and included a full-size DisplayPort, which was used for testing today. The TDP was reduced to 86 W and this was possible by lowering the number of shader units to 720, 31 texture mapping units, and halving the ROPs.

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. Essentially, PowerColor went all Oprah Winfrey on the HD 6850 and gave a heatsink to everyone.

Although modern GPUs produce much more heat than this specific graphics card, it would be cool (pun not intended) to see companies look at passively cooled GPUs again. The Arc B series could be a strong contender with the lower power requirements, though there are still passively cooled GPUs available for small form factor systems. According to UserBenchmarks, which should usually be taken with a grain of salt, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is around 4,000% better than the AMD Radeon HD 6850, which sounds about right.

It still holds up today … within reason

It’ll even play Cyberpunk 2077

Do I recommend sourcing one of these for playing modern games? Absolutely not. Options like the Intel Arc B580 are considerably better for value, performance, and the ability to enjoy ray tracing. What is impressive, however, is how the HD 6850 performs with today’s games on a modern PC. I put together a system using parts from storage, which were used in previous PC builds. Suffice it to say, the GPU would still be the bottleneck. Everything was then transferred to a test bench open-air case. The 4K monitor was used to see how this GPU performed across the board, though I expected terrible results above 1080p.

Many games even failed at 1080p, let alone 1440p and 4K. Most games had to be dropped to 720p (or lower) for smooth results, but even this resolution was taxing on the 15-year-old card running Cyberpunk 2077. 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.

Temperatures were about as one would expect. It’s a passively cooled GPU that reached around 83C sustained running Cyberpunk 2077. It’s worth noting this was on a test bench with little airflow, so we could see up to 10C knocked off with a decent PC case and all fan locations populated. The low power draw is amusing when compared to modern GPUs, though you won’t be able to go anywhere near more advanced features such as frame generation or ray tracing. It’s a marvel this thing still works today and managed to load some of the latest games, let alone run them — even if the results are less than ideal.