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PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 1GB GDDR5 - Faster Yet Cooler?

By Kenny Yeo - 8 Sep 2008

Overclocking, Temperature and Power Consumption

Overclocking

Despite being already overclocked, we were curious to see how much further the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 could go and how much extra performance that would yield. After carefully manipulating both the core and memory clockspeeds, we reached its threshold of 830MHz at the core and 3720MHz at the memory. It did improve performance somewhat, but it wasn't much.

Temperature

Before we start, we'll like to highlight some problems other reviewers have faced, and that involved inconsistent fan speeds. This constantly changing fan speed made the card more noisy and prominent than it would have been. Reviewers have pinpointed this to be caused by the card's BIOS. Our card fortunately faced no such problems and performed smoothly and consistently on all tests.

PowerColor boldly claims on the box that its card would run 10 degrees Celsius cooler and we were eager to see if that was true. Amazingly, the card ran at a relatively cool 65 degrees Celsius, which was a good 14 degrees cooler than a typical 4870 with its reference cooler. Clearly then, ZEROtherm's Professional Cooling System is not just a fancy heatsink. It actually works like advertised. However, there is a trade-off and that is the noise. The fan was really noisy, sounding almost like a turbine at time, and as such, can be insufferable.

Power Consumption

The standard HD 4870 is a power hungry card and the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 is no different. The power consumption was almost identical to that of the standard card.

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