Introduction

In October 2010, AMD released their Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870 which are based on the Barts GPU core. At its time it was an outstanding choice for the $250 segment, but NVIDIA countered this offer with their GeForce GTX 560 Ti which quickly took over that market.
Now AMD board partners are coming out with feature-rich, highly overclocked versions of the HD 6870 that try to increase the model's competitiveness.
PowerColor has a long history of creating overclocked boards with their PCS, PCS+ and PCS++ Series. Today we have on our testbench the PowerColor HD 6870 PCS++ which comes with a revamped board design and runs at the highest clock speeds available on any HD 6870 today. Pricing seems reasonable too, with just a small price increase over the reference design HD 6870 cards.