PowerColor HD 6870 PCS+ 1 GB Review 9

PowerColor HD 6870 PCS+ 1 GB Review

(9 Comments) »

Value and Conclusion

  • According to PowerColor, their HD 6870 PCS+ will retail around $255.
  • Quiet fan
  • Improvement in performance per Watt
  • Overclocked out of the box
  • Low power consumption
  • Software voltage control
  • Native full-size HDMI & DisplayPort output
  • Call of Duty 2 Modern Warfare Coupon included
  • GDDR5 memory
  • HDMI 1.4 & DisplayPort 1.2 support
  • EyeFinity support - up to 6 displays with one card
  • Support for DirectX 11
  • High Blu-ray power consumption
  • Lack of 3-way and 4-way CrossFire support
  • DirectX 11 relevance very limited at this time
  • No support for CUDA / PhysX
PowerColor's Radeon HD 6870 PCS+ is the best HD 6870 card you can buy at this time. It comes with some of the highest clock speed available of all HD 6870 offerings. Even though the GPU clock is high this results in only about 3% performance improvement. What really impressed me is the low fan noise levels of the card which are substantially lower than any HD 6800 card we have seen so far. PowerColor's HD 5800 PCS Series was famous for the low noise it delivered and it seems PowerColor has followed that tradition with their HD 6870 PCS+. Overclocking potential is comparable to other HD 6870 cards, and it is nice to see that PowerColor has decided to keep the CHiL voltage regulator which offers full software voltage control and extensive monitoring features for more extreme overclockers.
In terms of pricing the $15 price increase over the reference design is reasonable when taking into account the low noise cooler, the overclock out of the box and the included Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 game. Overall it is hard to find anything wrong with the PowerColor HD 6870 PCS+. If you are in the market for a HD 6870, this is the card to go for.
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Oct 19th, 2024 00:22 EDT change timezone

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