Powercolor HD6950 PCS++ 2GB Review – dual action

The Powercolor fixation with the Buggati Veyron is still an integral part of their box artwork. There is obviously no direct link with a 250+ mph sports car and a video card, but the concept is cool.

The bundle includes a free copy of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as well as literature on the installation, a software CD, VGA converter, Crossfire connector and a mini Displayport to Displayport converter.

Powercolor are using their custom made heatpipe cooler and the PCB is also a custom PowerColor design. Already off to a good start.

The PCS++ is a two slot design with 3 thick pipes passing heat into two series of aluminum fins on either side of the PCB.

The card requires an 8 pin and a 6 pin power connector for operation and it can also be operated in 2/3/4 way CrossfireX configurations.

The naked cooler exposed. As can be seen from the images above, the core design can actually accept 4 heatpipes, although this particular cooler only utilises three, passing heat into various sections of parallel running fin arrays.

The memory is Hynix H5GQ2H24MFR-T2C which are rated for 1250mhz (5000mhz effective speeds). A fully fledged HD6970 uses faster memory rated to 1500mhz (and set to 5.5GBps by AMD on the reference design). We also noticed that Powercolor are using a ChiL 8228 voltage controller instead of the Volterra VT1556 which is on the AMD reference design. Clearly this is to help manage the final price of the product.

There is a bios switch on the PCB which toggles between HD6950 and HD6970 ‘modes'. Both settings are shown above in the GPUz screenshots.

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