PowerColor HD 7850 PCS+ 2 GB Review 15

PowerColor HD 7850 PCS+ 2 GB Review

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Value and Conclusion

  • PowerColor's HD 7850 PCS+ is available online for $259.
  • Overclocked out of the box
  • Reasonable price increase
  • Quiet
  • Good overclocking potential
  • Low temperatures
  • Native full-size HDMI & DisplayPort output
  • Support for PCI-Express 3.0 and DirectX 11.1
  • AMD's ZeroCore power helps reduce power consumption
  • CCC Overdrive limits too low
  • No support for CUDA and PhysX
PowerColor's HD 7850 PCS+ is the highest clocked HD 7850 you can find on the market. Being backed by gigahertz GPU clocks the card delivers an excellent performance improvement over the AMD HD 7850 reference design - 8% averaged over our testing. This puts the card on the same performance levels as GTX 480 or HD 6970, at a lower price. Despite the large out-of-the-box overclock, there is some additional manual overclocking potential which is among the best of all HD 7850 cards we tested so far.
Higher clocks come with higher power consumption, which can end up being quite big on super overclocked custom cards, but it seems PowerColor did a good job with their design, so the power draw increase is nothing to worry about - around 20 W during gaming. Thanks to the PCS+ cooler and good fan settings in BIOS, the card runs extremely quiet in idle and at low noise levels under load. PowerColor did a good job here.
The price premium over the reference design is reasonable with $20. This actually puts the PCS+ on the same level as the reference design, when looking at price/performance only. Since you get a better cooler with lower noise as well, the PowerColor HD 7850 PCS+ should be on your short list when looking at HD 7850 designs.
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Nov 28th, 2024 04:48 EST change timezone

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