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Overclocking I must confess I rarely expect to get much performance out of a budget friendly card when overclocking. However the memory spec did show there might be some room to move. Simply adding a fan to the heatsink would help but PowerColor does not provide mounting hardware. So we are left with just the component quality to go by.
Using the ATI Catalyst Overdrive tool to get things started I push the GPU clock up to 670 MHz. Next I pushed the memory clock up to 485 MHz. The stability would not hold through a test at anything higher but frankly those numbers were a shock! that's an 11% bump in GPU speed and an 18% increase in memory speed. Here are a few of our benchmark results: The Synthetics:
The Real World Game Tests:
Conclusion The PowerColor HD4650 SCS3 video card is definitely a solid performer in the HTPC realm. With confident Blu-Ray performance and absolute silent cooling through the passive cooling. During testing the SCS3 passive cooler never reached a temperature over 55 degrees Celsius and idled at an impressible 32 degrees making it just as effective as some of the active cooling used in the competition. As a gaming card, the 4650 plays like a budget gaming card with the ability to play today's games at a tolerable level. Top games do require a significant reduction in settings but everything did end up running smoothly. In fact, I found myself playing Team Fortress 2 for a couple of hours one night before I remembered I was running it on the SCS3 HD4650! TF2 is hardly the graphics power house but I would be hard pressed to tell you I could see a difference. Much like the other 4600 series cards we have reviewed, the PowerColor HD4650 SCS3 will suffice for some light casual gaming, but that should not be the primary reason behind purchasing a card like this. There is a lot of competition in the ~$70 price range these days, I would not hesitate to recommend the PowerColor Hd4650 SCS3 as a passive HTPC solution. For anything else I would simply budget for something more.
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