PowerColor's HD 5870 PCS+ is one amazing piece of hardware. It offers enough 3D performance for any title, at any resolution, at any details setting, yet it runs so quiet. PowerColor's latest card is probably quieter than most midrange and low-end cards on the market today. With such a noise profile it could even end up in a media PC that is sufficiently quiet to not be disturbed during movie watching but also packs enough punch to play the latest titles on the big screen.
While the overclock out of the box was quite slim our card showed great overclocking potential when done manually, reaching the magic 1000 MHz mark. I am quite certain that AMD limits AIBs to certain clock ranges and does not allow any higher overclock. The performance increase from the reference design frequencies is marginal with only 3%, a difference not noticable in games. Overall it seems PowerColor designed an amazing card that also comes at a reasonable price increase. $10-20 over the reference design price of ~$400 is about 3-5%, hardly worth mentioning.