Powercolor HD 5870 PCS+ Review

1. Introduction2. PowerColor HD5870 PCS+3. Testing Methodology4. UniGine Heaven Benchmark 2.15. Resident Evil 56. Batman: Arkham Asylum7. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat8. Left4Dead29. Colin McRae Dirt 210. Crysis Warhead11. 3DMark Vantage12. Thermal Dynamics13. Acoustic Performance14. Power Consumption15. Manual Overclocking16. Closing Thoughts17. View All Pages

KitGuru has looked at many flavours of HD5870 over the last two months. Today we are going to look at a Powercolor version which is moderately overclocked and comes preinstalled with a hefty heatpipe cooler.

The HD5870 is still ATI's flagship single core card and has been paving the performance path for many months, only recently usurped by the new nVidia GTX 480. All is not lost for ATI however as the HD5870 is still a big seller, thanks to cooler temperatures, lower power drain and quieter performance. It is also around £70-100 less expensive, which makes for a considerable saving.

The Powercolor card we are looking at today has a core speed bump of 25mhz and the memory also gets a 100mhz effective increase.

Both the cooler and the PCB are a non reference design and after looking at the Powercolor HD5850 PCS+ we have high hopes this card will be just as impressive.

	Radeon HD 5850	Radeon HD 5870	Powercolor HD 5870 PCS+
Core Clock	725 MHz	850 MHZ	875 MHZ
Memory Clock	1000 MHz	1200 MHz	1225 MHz
Memory Size	1024 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit
Shader units	1440	1600	1600
ROPs	32	32	32

The Powercolor HD 5870 PCS+ arrives in a similar box to the HD 5850 version we reviewed last month. This strange fixation with futuristic cars being the centerpiece of box art.

The bundle contains a Crossfire connector, a driver CD, an installation guide, as well as a DVI-VGA Adapter and a free copy of the excellent Colin McRae Dirt 2.

The Powercolor cooler is huge and covers the whole card. It is rather mundane however, finished in plain black. The card is a dual slot design, exactly like the reference board.

The heatpipes add quite a bit of extra width to the card and if you have a smaller chassis this might cause fitting issues with the side panel. We had no problems fitting into the Thermaltake A60 Armor chassis however.

The card is supplied with two dual link DVI ports, an HDMI port and a Displayport. AMD's integrated sound device supports HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.

If you have money to spare and want to buy two then the card fully supports Crossfire. We found with the inner crossfire connector on the PCB however that the Crossfire connector is very snug against the heatpipe.

The card is identical to the reference design when it comes to power connectors. Two 6 pin PSU feeds are required.

The memory on the card is Samsung, K4G1032FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 2500 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective) – which means Powercolor are being slightly conservative in their current configuration.

When testing video cards, it is important to use a system which would suit the target audience. For this review we are using a Intel Core i7 980x processor paired with the excellent, KitGuru award winning Asus Rampage III Extreme Motherboard – check out the review here if you missed it.

We will compare the card to the reference HD 5870 model as well as a reference HD5850 and pre-overclocked Sapphire Toxic Edition HD5850. A very small percentage of the audience (1%)  use a 30 inch screen so we like to include 24 inch resolutions when possible (1920×1200). Keeping in HD5850 results is also a good indication of what people can expect if they sold a 5850 and wanted to upgrade to the higher end model.

Test System:
Powercolor HD5870 PCS+
Sapphire HD5850 Toxic 1GB Edition
AMD Reference HD5870
AMD Reference HD5850
Intel Core i7 980x
Coolit ECO A.L.C.
Asus Rampage III Extreme Motherboard
6GB Corsair DDR3 1866mhz Memory
Intel 160GB SSD Drive
Lacie 730 30 inch screen.
Western Digital Raid 0 (2×1TB Drives)
Enermax 1250W Revolution PSU
Thermaltake Armor A60 Chassis

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit – all newest patches applied
Fraps Professional
Catalyst 10.6 driver

Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Digital Sound Level Noise Decibel Meter Style 2

Resident Evil 5
Batman Arkham Asylum
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat
Left 4 Dead 2
Colin McRae Dirt 2
Crysis Warhead
3dMark Vantage
UniGine Heaven Benchmark 2.1

All the latest bios updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru test all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.

Our minimum frame rate game graphs have three main zones. These are sampled over a specific 30 interval period of time and then mapped into a chart. These are handy reference guides to detail worst case performance of the product being reviewed.

Over 30fps is the zone most people want at all times, this means perfectly smooth frame rates with no hitching.

Between 30fps and 25fps is the KitGuru ‘Playable' zone, although some people might notice occasional stuttering in specific scenes.

Under 25fps is classed as the KitGuru ‘Danger Zone' which means that the game experience will be less than impressive. Settings and/or resolution would need lowered to help smooth out the frame rate.

Unigine is a top-notch technology, that can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of our customers claim that they have never seen such an extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand. It is already used in the development of different projects (mostly games).

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We always test Unigine at 1920×1080 (1080p) at default settings so comparisons with other graphics cards in Kitguru reviews are possible.

The card puts in a decent showing, although it certainly appears that nVidia boards are stronger with the Unigine tests as the lower end eVGA GTX460 Superclocked board recently averaged 33.7 fps.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

All game settings were set to maximum and we used 8x anti aliasing for the results with Resident Evil 5.

We always liked the Resident Evil 5 engine as it runs well on even current mid range hardware and we can see all the cards on test today can handle 1920×1200 resolution easy enough. When we move to 2560×1600 all cards can deliver good rates, apart from the reference HD5850 which would need settings lowered slightly to give a smooth experience.

Batman: Arkham Asylum, written by veteran Batman writer Paul Dini, is based on the long-running comic book mythos, as opposed to most other Batman games which are adaptations of the character in other media besides the source material. The Joker, Batman’s arch enemy, has instigated an elaborate plot from within Arkham Asylum where many of Batman’s other villains have been incarcerated. Batman investigates and comes to learn that the Joker is trying to create an army of Bane-like creatures that threaten Gotham City, and is forced to put a stop to the Joker’s plans. The game’s main characters are voiced by the actors from the DC Animated Universe, namely Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, and Arleen Sorkin reprise their roles as Batman, the Joker, and Harley Quinn, respectively. The game is played as a third-person perspective action-adventure game with a primary focus on Batman’s combat abilities, his stealth and detective skills, and an arsenal of gadgets that can be used in both combat and exploration.

To test we cranked all the settings to full and toggled on 4xAA as well. we took average results from 3 sections of gameplay across various levels. This would really be a worst case scenario.

The HD5870 cards in this test really deliver the goods and the Powercolor card never drops below the magic 30fps mark.

The events of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat unfold shortly after the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl following the ending in which Strelok destroys the C-Consciousness. Having discovered the open path to the Zone’s center, the government decides to stage a large-scale operation to take control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

According to the operation’s plan, the first military group is to conduct an air scouting of the territory to map the anomalous fields. Thereafter, making use of the maps, the main military forces are to be dispatched.

Despite thorough preparations, the operation fails. Most of the advanced helicopters crash. In order to collect information on the reasons for the operation’s failure, Ukraine’s Security Service send their agent (protagonist – Alexander Degtyarev) into the Zone. From now on everything depends on the player.

The player must traverse through the Zone and investigate the crash sites. As the player progresses he starts learning how the helicopters were shot down. The climax of the story begins when the player reaches Pripyat to find survivors of the helicopter crashes. The player eventually meets Strelok from the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game (Shadow of Chernobyl) and learns of the secrets behind the Zone.

This game uses the XRAY 1.6 Engine which allows for advanced graphics features through DX11 such as real time GPU tessellation. We set MSAA to 4x and enabled tessellation. Ambient Occlusion was also enabled.

The overclock, even slight, has helped the Powercolor card to remain above the 30 fps sweet spot at all times during our testing. The overclocked HD5850 struggles a little at these settings and the reference HD5850 would need AA reduced for smooth gameplay.

Left 4 Dead 2 is a cooperative first-person shooter game. It is the sequel to Valve Corporation’s award-winning Left 4 Dead. The game launched on November 17, 2009, for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 in the United States; it launched November 20 in Europe. It builds upon the cooperatively-focused gameplay of the original and uses Valve’s proprietary Source engine, the same game engine used in Left 4 Dead. The game made its world premiere at E3 2009 with a trailer during the Microsoft press event.

In a similar fashion to the original, Left 4 Dead 2 is set during the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic, and focuses on four survivors fighting against hordes of the infected. The survivors must fight their way through levels, interspersed with safe houses that act as checkpoints, with the goal of reaching a rescue vehicle at the campaign’s finale.

The gameplay is procedurally altered by an artificial intelligence engine dubbed the “Director” that monitors the players’ performance and adjust the scenario to provide a dynamic challenge. Several new features have been introduced: new types of infected, melee weapons, and a story-arc that connects the game’s five campaigns together.

We performed testing today at 2560×1600 with 8xAA and 16xAF – all other settings were pushed to the max.

The Source engine proves to be no problem for any of the hardware today, even at the maximum resolutions and eye candy settings. Being purely subjective, if you want to just play Valve games, even on a 30 inch screen then a reference clocked HD5850 is more than enough.

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. This is the first game in the McRae series since McRae’s death in 2007. It was announced on 19 November 2008 and features Ken Block, Travis Pastrana, Tanner Foust, and Dave Mirra. The game includes many new race-events, including stadium events. Along with the player, an RV travels from one event to another, and serves as ‘headquarters’ for the player. It features a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to diverse and challenging real-world environments. The game takes place across four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. The game includes five different event types: Rally, Rallycross, ‘Trailblazer,’ ‘Land Rush’ and ‘Raid.’ The World Tour mode sees players competing in multi-car and solo races at new locations, and also includes a new multiplayer mode.

This engine support DX11 and was one of the integral releases for ATI when they launched the 5xxx series cards a while ago. Hardware tessellation is used on the crowd, as well as water and cloth objects. DirectCompute 11 accelerated high definition ambient occulsion is also integrated with full floating point high dynamic range lighting.

We enabled maximum settings, including hardware tessellated animated crowds and dynamic water via ULTRA settings.

The reference card is the only one to struggle a little at these settings with several dips around 24-25fps. The HD5870 delivers a fantastic gaming experience with the overclocked Powercolor card managing to average a couple of extra frames per second.

Crysis Warhead, like the original, Crysis, is based in a future where an ancient alien spacecraft has been discovered beneath the Earth on an island east of the Philippines. The single-player campaign has the player assume the role of (Former SAS) Delta Force operator Sergeant Michael Sykes, referred to in-game by his call sign, Psycho. Psycho’s arsenal of futuristic weapons builds on those showcased in Crysis, with the introduction of Mini-SMGs which can be dual-wielded, a six-shot grenade launcher equipped with EMP grenades, and the destructive, short ranged Plasma Accumulator Cannon (PAX). The highly versatile Nanosuit returns.

In Crysis Warhead, the player fights North Korean and extraterrestrial enemies, in many different locations, such as a tropical island jungle, inside an “Ice Sphere”, an underground mining complex, which is followed by a convoy train transporting an unknown alien object held by the North Koreans, and finally, to an airfield. Like Crysis, Warhead uses Microsoft’s new API, Direct3D 10 (DirectX 10) for graphics rendering.

Crysis Warhead is still a system killer and a HD5870 is probably one of the best cards you can buy if you want to play this game at a high resolution with decent levels of image quality. The overclocked Powercolor card comes in top by a few extra frames per second over the reference board.

3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by Futuremark Corporation (formerly MadOnion, formerly Futuremark) to determine the performance of a computer’s 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities.

The measurement unit 3DMark is intended to give a normalized mean for comparing different PC hardware configurations (mostly graphics processing units and central processing units), which proponents such as gamers and overclocking enthusiasts assert is indicative of end-user performance capabilities. Between 3DMark99 and 2000, MadOnion created a simpler 3D benchmark, which played only a DirectX 7 demo sequence at 640×480, with no extra tests. It was called XL-R8R and was aimed at providing upgrade information, based on the results of the benchmark.

We used the Extreme settings for testing with a resolution of 1920×1200.

The results fall in exactly as we expected with a close call between HD5870 series cards.

We measure temperatures with diodes and our Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp gun for verification. Room ambience in our labs is kept to 25c with air conditioning to ensure accurate results.

To stress test we run Crysis at Enthusiast settings at 2560×1600 and then use Furmark. Furmark is a synthetic test and not really indicative of ‘real world’ conditions but it is interesting nontheless.

The cooler on the Powercolor card is doing a great job, with temperatures never hitting 70c when gaming. Our Furmark test shows that the Powercolor manages to keep the card at 76c while the reference board is running 12c hotter.

From today we have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The Powercolor HD5870 PCS+ is one of the quietest cards we have ever tested and these results really are astounding. You would be hard pressed to know the card is on, even when under load.

We could hear a faint hum under Furmark load and if this was used in real world situations the cooler fan would be easily drowned out by chassis fans.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. The best way to get maximum load results is by using Furmark, and even though it is not indicative of a real world situation it shows the limits the card can theoretically demand. The ‘gaming’ results are measured when playing Crysis Warhead and is a more valuable result to take from this.

The Powercolor card is built on a custom PCB and we can see that is it consuming more power when gaming (17w) and substantially more under full, synthethic load (22w).

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.

The Powercolor HD5870 PCS+ left the KitGuru lab assistants with very positive feelings. The heatpipe cooler is extremely capable and due to its thermal effectiveness Powercolor are able to spin the fan much slower than the reference design.

We are slightly bewildered as to why Powercolor have opted for such a modest overclock ‘out of the box', we already are aware that no two cards are created equal but with such massive headroom they could easily be shipping these at 900-925mhz core and 1250-1275 mhz memory. The performance increases therefore as they stand over a reference card are minimal, but they could have been so much more. In fact we can only imagine that a portion of the audience buying this card won't touch the core or memory speeds and may very well not be getting anywhere near the performance levels they could be.

Checking for a UK price we were slightly surprised to see a new PCS++ model (yes two plus signs, it isn't a typo), which is retailing for £10 more than the PCS+ Edition at £350 inc vat. The PCS+ we reviewed today is £340 inc vat and now comes with Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2. The differences between the two? The PCS++ has a 950mhz core speed. I would be surprised if the PCS++ was an entirely different batch of cards, so it seems that Powercolor have just adjusted the bios with the higher core frequency and slapped another £10 to the asking price. Could they be hand picking cards for the PCS++ range? It is not something I could confirm, I would need a broader selection of samples in our labs to verify how many could easily hit 950mhz core … but ours did easily.

KitGuru says: The Powercolor HD5870 PCS+ is one of the quietest graphics cards we have yet to test, which is some achievement, especially considering the HD5870 is a performance card. It overclocks like hell and will make a perfect match for a performance oriented enthusiast with a big monitor and sensitive ears.

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