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.


Just like the regular HD 5870, the Powercolor HD 5870 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 GPU voltage is managed by a UP6213 voltage controller, which does not support I2C software voltage control. The square chips you see on the second picture are Renesas MOSFETs. Each one incorporates a high-side FET, low-side FET and driver in a single package - essentially one PWM phase. Such a high-density design helps to reduce the PCB area consumption and also reduces the complexity of sourcing parts.


This is AMD's 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.