A Closer Look

The thermal solution of Powercolor's HD 5850 PCS+ consists of three parts. The first one that comes off is the black plastic cooler shroud with the fan.


Now you can see the big heatsink with a large number of fins and its four heatpipes.


The central heatsink uses a large copper heatplate that soaks up heat to pass it on to the four heatpipes which move the heat to the fins on the back of the cooler.


The third and last cooling component is this simple metal heatsink that sits on top of the VRM circuitry it seems to be placed in the airflow under the black cooler shroud to be fed some fresh air.


Just like the regular HD 5850, the Powercolor HD 5850 PCS+ requires two six-pin power connectors.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 2500 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


The UP 6219 is a cost effective voltage regulator that Powercolor has chosen to replace the much more expensive Volterra controllers on the reference design. Nothing is known about this voltage regulator, but I doubt that it supports software voltage control.


This is AMD's new Cypress GPU, it comes with a whopping 2154 million transistors and is produced on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The Cypress die size is 334 mm².