Introduction

Last year AMD released their new Radeon HD 5800 Series of graphics cards which quickly became a big success due to the numerous improvements made over previous generations. Over the course of the last months AMD has been adding more cards to their DirectX 11 lineup quickly, successfully completing the lineup.

AMD's Radeon HD 5770 has been out for several months now and custom-designed HD 5770 designs from all AIBs are very well established in the market. In January PowerColor sent us their HD 5770 PCS+ which delivered some improvements over the reference design, but nothing groundbreaking.

PowerColor's new HD 5770 PCS++ adds another 25 MHz memory clock on the HD 5770 PCS+ while keeping the core clock the same. All other specs have remained identical too, the only other noteworthy changes are the use of a Volterra voltage regulator and memory heatsinks on the back. Our PCS++ sample had Hynix memory which typically overclocks better than the Samsung on the PCS+.

Packaging

Except for the added "+" sign, the HD 5770 PCS++ package looks identical to that of the HD 5770 PCS+.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide
• CrossFire bridge
• DVI to VGA adapter

The Card

The PCB is as compact as all other HD 5770 PCBs. The most noteworthy feature here is the use of little heatsinks on the memory.


Due to the cooler design PowerColor installed the memory heatsinks only on one side of the PCB. The memory chips on the other side sit in the cooler's airflow, so they receive direct cooling.


The card occupies two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports, one HDMI port, and one DisplayPort. This is just one of many output configurations that are possible on the new cards, thanks to the overhauled display output logic. Basically the card can drive six TMDS signals that can be combined in any way (a dual-link DVI consumes two TMDS lines).

For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.


CrossFire configurations with up to four cards are supported, you may also mix cards from different vendors in your CrossFire setup.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.