Powercolor has officially launched its passively cooled HD 3870 paired up with the all new SCS3 passive cooling system.

In spite of being a passively cooled high-end card it still sticks to DAAMIT's reference design, a least to some extent. This one works at 775MHz for the core and 1126MHz for 512MB of GDDR4 memory with 256-bit memory bus. The most interesting part is the new SCS3 passive cooling system which consists of two large aluminum heatsinks, each connected via two heatpipes to the copper GPU block. One of the heatsinks is located at the back of the card, thus making this card a three-slot design, which will take its toll if you decided to do a Crossfire setup in a small case.

Our friend from TechPowerUP, W1zzard, had a chance to play with one of these so you might want to check out the review; after all, it has been given their editor's choice award. The award is mainly due to the fact that the price is $20 more when compared to the reference card and that passive cooling did a great job even with some overclocking involved.

You can check out the review here, and Powercolor's product page is here.