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The Card arrives in, yes, yet another box with a car on front. It seems Asus and Powercolor are obsessed with changing their graphics cards into futuristic sports and muscle cars. Why? I have no idea!
The back of the box explains that the fan can be adjusted to alter the air flow, we will look at this later.
Our card was not in a full retail box yet and as such it was a little loose in the packaging as can be seen above. I think we received one of the first samples off the production line.
The box contains a driver CD, a Crossfire Connector and a DVI adapter. There is also a black and white guide showing how to adjust the fan – this incidentally can also be removed from the top of the cooler to allow for easy cleaning of the heatsink, which is a very practical feature to add. Our early reviewer bundle didn't have it, but Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will be included as a free game.
The Powercolor has a traditionally red coloured ATI PCB and the front shroud is home to a black 9 blade fan.
There is a substantial heatsink under this which connects to a copper block which cools the graphics processing core.
Powercolor are making the cooling unit on this card a focal point of their sales pitch. The system is simple, you can pull it out by around a centimeter which changes the flow of air.
The cooler has three little angled levers which can be pulled to move the fan out from the heatsink. The fan can also be removed from the main unit, exposing the heatsink for easy cleaning. How cool is this?
It is a really nice concept actually as cleaning the heatsink of a regular graphics card can be quite a painful experience. It is also worth pointing out that when we fitted this card in our Silverstone SG07 chassis when the cooler is ‘extended' we noticed it was able to move more air – it was almost touching the chassis it was that close. Powercolor claim that this fan system will ‘maximise the efficiency of air convection by increasing the space between fan and heat'.
This is the fan head in extended mode.
The fan design is also really good as Powercolor have opted for a larger model than the one found on the reference design. The only negative would be that unlike the reference design hot air will not be expelled from the rear of the chassis.
Several views of the card – top left fitted inside the Silverstone Sugo SG07.
It requires a single 6 pin PCI e power connector to operate, which means almost any semi modern PSU will be able to power this without a problem.
Twin dual link DVI output as well as displayport and HDMI connectors. Thats all the digital bases covered then!
As would be expected it is indeed crossfire capable if you fancy more power down the line.
A GPUz screenshot showing the cards overclocked specifications as discussed earlier. Memory is running at an effective 4.9Gbps.
