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

By Kenny Yeo - 8 Sep 2008

The PowerColor PCS+ Radeon HD 4870 1GB GDDR5

The PowerColor PCS+ Radeon HD 4870 1GB GDDR5

Like we've said, this card is essentially an overclocked version of the standard Radeon HD 4870 that was released about a month ago. While the reference HD 4870 was clocked at 750MHz for the core and 3600MHz for the memory, this offering from PowerColor ups both the core and memory clock speeds by 50MHz and 100MHz respectively. So the eventual clock is 800MHz and 3700MHz. Also, the frame buffer in this card has been doubled from 512MB to 1GB, which should give us better performance when running demanding games such as Crysis on higher resolutions.

The Professional Cooling System might not look like much, but it certainly does the job (as you will find out later).

The shot of the back of the card. There's nothing special to report here, so move along.

There's nothing special about the rear I/O ports either. The PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 has a pair of HDCP compliant DVI ports and a mini-DIN ports, like most other cards do.

The PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 comes with two CrossFire connectors, which means up to four 4870 cards can be linked, but only if your motherboard is capable of such a configuration.

Like most high-end cards, the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 requires two 6-pin connectors and a PSU rating of at least 500W.

While we were excited at the prospects of a tweaked HD 4870, we had our reservations nonetheless. Chiefly, we were concerned about its operating temperature. From our earlier review of the Radeon HD 4870, we learnt that despite being manufactured using a 55nm process, the 4870 ran much warmer than its competitors and we were worried that overclocking the card would worsen the problem.

PowerColor obviously anticipated this and implemented on this card, a third party heatsink, the rather unimaginatively named "Professional Cooling System" by ZEROtherm. The PCS+, simply put, consists of a large fan sitting on top of a huge heatsink with thick heat pipes. Looking at it, we can't help but point out that it closely resembles MSI's Hybrid Freezer. PowerColor claims that this cooler on the PCS+ HD 4870 can reduce temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Celsius, but count us as skeptics until we test it ourselves and we've got them covered later in the review.

The contents of the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 are as follows:

  • Driver CD
  • Quick installation guide
  • DVI-to-VGA adapter
  • DVI-to-HDMI adapter
  • S-Video to RCA cable
  • 6-pin PCIe power connector
  • CrossFire connector
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