AMD's Radeon HD 5770 offers a healthy performance boost of more than 25% over the last generation HD 4770. It also brings several new features to the table like EyeFinity, support for DirectX 11 and improved HDMI audio. Another area that has been worked on is power consumption which is now lower than ever. PowerColor even managed to marginally reduce the load power consumption of their HD 5770 PCS+ below that of the reference design HD 5770.
In order to offset their product from the competition, PowerColor has increased the clock speeds on their PCS+ HD 5770 slightly, but unfortunately this can only make a small difference of 3% over the HD 5770 reference design. On a game running at 60 FPS, a 3% improvement results in 61.8 FPS, a difference you will certainly not notice during gaming. Manual overclocking is also less than spectacular with only 6% on the core and 16% on the memory.
Coming at a price point of $165, the card is $10 more expensive than the AMD reference design. In return you get a quiet card (what AMD's reference HD 5770 should be), slightly higher clocks and slightly reduced power consumption. Even though $10 is relatively much considering a price point of $160, it is very little when looking at absolute numbers, $10 barely gets you a few beers or into any recent movie. If I had the choice between the reference design for $155 or the PowerColor HD 5770 PCS+ for $165 I'd go for the PCS+ because it is so much quieter. But if you are purely looking for the best bang for the buck, then you should also look at "old" DirectX 10 / 10.1 cards which offer similar performance at a lower price point.
With the latest BIOS update (see the first page), this card does much better, especially since it provides a unique selling point feature over the reference design which is greatly reduced fan noise.