PowerColor HD 6970 PCS+ 2 GB Review 10

PowerColor HD 6970 PCS+ 2 GB Review

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Value and Conclusion

  • PowerColor's HD 6970 PCS+ will retail for around $380.
  • Overclocked out of the box
  • High clock speeds
  • Small price increase over the reference design
  • Quiet fan under load
  • Support for voltage control via I2C
  • Lower power consumption
  • Full size HDMI output
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Coupon included
  • Support for DirectX 11
  • Noisy fan in idle
  • High Blu-ray power consumption
  • Only half the memory chips are cooled
  • DirectX 11 relevance limited at this time
  • No support for CUDA/PhysX
PowerColor's HD 6970 PCS+ is the highest clocked HD 6970 card at the moment. It comes with blazing clock speeds of 940 MHz core and 1425 MHz memory. When averaged over all our tests, this can result in a 3% performance increase when compared to the AMD reference design.
PowerColor's big new dual fan heatsink delivers low temperatures across the board, but seems to have some trouble being quiet in idle. Apparently the motor that PowerColor chose for the fan on their card has a minimum speed at which it will always run, no matter what fan control in the card wants. Under load however the card is significantly quieter than AMD's HD 6970 reference design cooler.
Maximum clocks on our sample were decent, reaching higher speeds than other HD 6970 cards we tested so far. With some manual voltage increase we could even go well beyond the 1000 MHz barrier. Price-wise the HD 6970 PCS+ comes at a reasonable $10 increase over the reference design cards. It also includes a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 coupon to offset the cost further. If you can live with the increased fan noise in idle, the card is a great choice, especially for users who just want to get the maximum performance out of their card without spending too much time on overclocking.
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Dec 26th, 2024 07:18 EST change timezone

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