PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 PCS+ Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Too Fast and Cool to be True?

Since time immemorial, man has had an insatiable appetite for power and speed. This can be easily appreciated when you look at modern day transport. From horse carriages of the days of yore, to cars, to maglev trains, to airplanes, the only limits that stand in man's way are the laws of physics. This lust for power and speed can be seen in computing as well, giving birth to faster processors, faster memory and of course faster graphics cards. As we've seen in our earlier review, the standard Radeon HD 4870 is already a very capable performer, providing more than enough graphics processing power for your average or even hardcore gamer. But when was man ever satisfied? Hence overclocking.

However, the inescapable fact is that with more power comes more heat. Therefore, graphics cards require well-designed coolers to ensure that the GPU doesn't become a campfire sitting on your motherboard. This relentless lust for power and speed has now led prominent ATI graphics card manufacturer, PowerColor, to give us this - the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 1GB GDDR5.

The PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 is one of the earliest overclocked versions of the HD 4870 made available to gamers, and is packed in a compact box, which we find tasteful.

The PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 is an overclocked variant of the standard Radeon HD 4870 which PowerColor claims to be not only faster than the reference, but also cooler. But before we delve into the details of the card, let us first take a look at how the card stacks up against the competition.

PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 and Competitive Comparison Cards
Powercolor 4870

Model	PowerColorPCS+ HD 4870 1GB	RadeonHD 4870 512MB	RadeonHD 4850 512MB	NVIDIAGTX 280 1GB	NVIDIAGTX 260 896MB
CoreCode	RV770	RV770	RV770	GT200	GT200
TransistorCount	956million	956million	956million	1400million	1400million
ManufacturingProcess	55nm	55nm	55nm	65nm	65nm
CoreClock	800MHz	750MHz	625MHz	602MHz	576MHz
StreamProcessors	160Processors (800 Stream processing units)	160Processors (800Stream processing units)	160Processors (800Stream processing units)	240Stream Processors	192Stream Processors
StreamProcessor Clock	800MHz	750MHz	625MHz	1296MHz	1242MHz
TextureMapping Units (TMU) or Texture Filtering (TF)units	40	40	40	80	64
RasterOperator units (ROP)	16	16	16	32	28
MemoryClock	3700MHzGDDR5	3600MHzGDDR5	2000MHzGDDR3	2214MHzGDDR3	1998MHzGDDR3
DDRMemory Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	512-bit	448-bit
MemoryBandwidth	121.6GB/s	115.2GB/s	64GB/s	141.7GB/s	111.9GB/s
PCIExpress Interface	PCIever 2.0 x16	PCIever 2.0 x16	PCIever 2.0 x16	PCIever 2.0 x16	PCIever 2.0 x16
MolexPower Connectors	2 x6-pin	2 x6-pin	6-pin	6-pin,8-pin	2 x6-pin
MultiGPU Technology	CrossFireX	CrossFireX	CrossFireX	SLI	SLI
DVIOutput Support	2 xDual-Link	2 xDual-Link	2 xDual-Link	2 xDual-Link	2 xDual-Link
HDCPOutput Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
StreetPrice	US$340	US$299	US$199	US$499	US$299



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