Powercolor HD 5870 PCS+ Review

Overclocking the cards properly can mean we need to look elsewhere for software and although ATI supply Overdrive within the driver it does not always allow us to crank the card to the maximum speeds we can achieve. We use MSI Afterburner for overclocking today.

We managed to achieve close to a 15 percent overclock on the core and around 11 percent on the memory, this is a massive increase over reference speeds and very impressive. We didn't quite make it to 1000mhz on the core, the only card we have tested able to hit this high was the MSI R5870 Lightning … which we reviewed several weeks ago.

Running a quick test with Crysis Warhead, we managed to achieve another 6 fps with the overclocked settings … from 42fps to 48fps. Minimum frames rose from 32fps to 36fps. Significant improvements.

We then rechecked our temperatures after applying the manual overclock.

We were impressed with the Powercolor overclocked results, only a 2c increase when gaming and when running Furmark. We noticed the fan did increase slightly more to compensate, and we recorded a further noise increase of 1.5dBA when running Furmark. Still relatively quiet however.

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