Powercolor HD6870 PCS+ Review

The Powercolor HD6870 PCS+ box is a striking design with a futuristic car on the front and specifications and details of the product on the sides.

The bundle is strong. There is a software CD, Crossfire cable, mini displayport to HDMI converter, VGA converter cable, literature on the PCS+ and a free copy of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

The HD6870 PCS+ falls outside the reference design, which is what we all want to hear. There is a large 9 blade fan in the middle of the cooler which directly cools the copper heatpipes and aluminum fins underneath.

Connectivity is well catered for with DL-DVI, SL-DVI, HDMI/ 2x mini display port connectors at the rear. All of these are protected with removable plastic covers.

The PCS+ requires two six pin power connectors, which holds true to reference card specifications.

The card ships with eight Hynix H5GQ1H24AFA GDDR5 DRAM chips onboard which we have seen before on other AMD cards, such as the HD5770. These are cooled directly by the fan system above.

The cooler is based around three thick heatpipes, which spread the heat between two series of aluminum fins on either side of the copper core. We will investigate the cooling proficency of the Powercolor card later in the review.

GPUz reports 940mhz on the core and 1100/4400mhz from the memory. Memory bandwidth is measured at over 140GB/s which is impressive for a card in this price sector.

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