PowerColor Radeon HD 5870 PCS+

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] Late last month, NVIDIA unveiled its long-awaited GeForce GTX 480 graphics card. At the same time, it answered a lot of our questions, primarily the one of how it would compare against ATI's highest-end offering, the Radeon HD 5870. As we discovered, while the GTX 480 does indeed out-perform the HD 5870 in most tests (~5 - 10%), the HD 5870 was arguably still the more attractive offering. It seems odd to state such a thing, but the process of deciding between both cards boiled down to a couple of things. The most important was the price. As the GTX 480 is priced at $100 above the HD 5870, it's a tough sell for a 5 - 10% performance bump. To make the decision even harder, NVIDIA's launch cards suffer horrible temperatures, loud fan noises and draws far more power from the socket than AMD's offering. From a personal standpoint, I sided with AMD's card at the end of that article, because it beat the GTX 480 in almost everything aside from the raw performance. Where the GTX 480 also shines is with PhysX and 3D Vision support, which AMD's cards obviously do not. These two things aren't deal-breakers for me, but they are for many. Two personal friends of mine opted for NVIDIA's latest offerings (GTX 470 and GTX 480) primarily because of the PhysX support. So, NVIDIA's certainly doing something right there. Right before the launch of the GTX 480, AMD itself knew that it had nothing to worry about, because it sent us a card via PowerColor that aims to reaffirm AMD's excellent performance/$ ratio. The card in particular we're looking at is the PCS+ version, which uses a special cooler, features slightly higher clocks and also includes a full copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Closer Look. By this point in time, you're all likely very familiar with the Radeon HD 5870. PowerColor's model does little more than up the clocks (850MHz > 875MHz Core and 1200MHz > 1225MHz Memory) and swaps out the reference cooler for another that's a bit quieter and more efficient. And of course as mentioned above, this particular version also currently includes a free copy of Modern Warfare 2. Model Core MHz Mem MHz Memory Bus Width Processors Radeon HD 5970 725 1000 2048MB 256-bit 1600 x 2 Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 850 1200 1024MB 256-bit 1600 Radeon HD 5870 850 1200 1024MB 256-bit 1600 Radeon HD 5850 725 1000 1024MB 256-bit 1440 Radeon HD 5830 800 1000 1024MB 256-bit 1120 Radeon HD 5770 850 1200 1024MB 128-bit 800 Radeon HD 5750 700 1150 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 720 Radeon HD 5670 775 1000 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 400 Radeon HD 5570 650 900 512MB - 1GB 128-bit 400 Radeon HD 5450 650 800 512MB - 1GB 64-bit 80 As it stands, the HD 5870 is still AMD's highest-end single-GPU offering, with the dual-GPU HD 5970 sitting above it. For those craving a lot of screen real-estate, there's the Eyefinity 6 version of the HD 5870 available as well. We're in the process of preparing an in-depth look at that card and the six-display configuration, but are running far behind. Please stay tuned though as the article will be well worth it! Below you can see PowerColor's special cooler design. The shroud is a light plastic and allows a lot of air to make its way through. The fan is also large, and very quiet. As you can see, there are heatpipes extruding through the back, somewhat similar to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480 design. As you'd expect, the back of PowerColor's card features the same video outputs we've come to expect from AMD's HD 5000 series. This includes 2 x DVI, 1 x DisplayPort and 1 x HDMI. If you wanted, you could hook up four displays from this single card. In the same photo, you can see the CrossFireX bridge. Here you can get a better view of the heatpipe design, and for the most part, it's not far different than many other designed on the market. The heatsink itself is finned in its entirety with the heatpipes coming straight from above the GPU core itself. The design seems simple, but it's efficient. That about wraps up the look at the card, but as a reminder, PowerColor is currently bundling in Modern Warfare 2 with this PCS+ version, so if that's a game you've been on the lookout for, you get a good deal when picking up this particular model. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate as possible. Our testing is rigorous and time-consuming, but we feel the effort is worth it. In an attempt to leave no question unanswered, this page contains not only our testbed specifications, but also a fully-detailed look at how we conduct our testing. For an exhaustive look at our methodologies, even down to the Windows Vista installation, please refer to this article. Test Machine. The below table lists our testing machine's hardware, which remains unchanged throughout all GPU testing, minus the graphics card. Each card used for comparison is also listed here, along with the driver version used. Each one of the URLs in this table can be clicked to view the respective review of that product, or if a review doesn't exist, it will bring you to the product on the manufacturer's website. Component Model Processor Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition - Quad-Core, 3.33GHz, 1.33v Motherboard Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME - X58-based, F7 BIOS (05/11/09) Memory Corsair DOMINATOR - DDR3-1333 7-7-7-24-1T, 1.60 ATI Graphics Radeon HD 5870 1GB (PowerColor PCS+) - Catalyst 10.3 Radeon HD 5870 1GB (Reference) - Catalyst 10.3 Radeon HD 5850 1GB (Sapphire Toxic) - Catalyst 10.2 Radeon HD 5850 1GB (ASUS) - Catalyst 9.10 Radeon HD 5830 1GB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (02/10/10) Radeon HD 5770 1GB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (10/06/09) Radeon HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire) - Catalyst 9.11 Radeon HD 5670 512MB (Reference) - Beta Catalyst (12/16/09) Radeon HD 5570 1GB (Sapphire) - Beta Catalyst (12/11/09) NVIDIA Graphics GeForce GTX 480 1536MB (Reference) - GeForce 197.17 GeForce GTX 295 1792MB (Reference) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 285 1GB (EVGA) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 275 896MB (Reference) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTX 260 896MB (XFX) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GTS 250 1GB (EVGA) - GeForce 186.18 GeForce GT 240 512MB (ASUS) - GeForce 196.21 Audio On-Board Audio Storage Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11 Power Supply Corsair HX1000W Chassis SilverStone TJ10 Full-Tower Display Gateway XHD3000 30" Cooling Thermalright TRUE Black 120 Et cetera Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit When preparing our testbeds for any type of performance testing, we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's BIOS. Internet is disabled. No Virus Scanner or Firewall is installed. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. Hard drives affected are defragged with PerfectDisk 10 prior to a fresh benchmarking run. Machine has proper airflow and the room temperature is 80°F (27°C) or less. To aide with the goal of keeping accurate and repeatable results, we alter certain services in Windows Vista from starting up at boot. This is due to the fact that these services have the tendency to start up in the background without notice, potentially causing slightly inaccurate results. Disabling "Windows Search" turns off the OS' indexing which can at times utilize the hard drive and memory more than we'd like. Services Disabled Prior to Benchmarking PerfectDisk 10. Windows Defender. Windows Error Reporting Service. Windows Event Log. Windows Firewall. Windows Search. Windows Update. For more robust information on how we tweak Windows, please refer once again to this article. Game Titles. At this time, we currently benchmark all of our games using three popular resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1080 and also 2560x1600. 1680x1050 was chosen as it's one of the most popular resolutions for gamers sporting ~20" displays. 1920x1080 might stand out, since we've always used 1920x1200 in the past, but we didn't make this change without some serious thought. After taking a look at the current landscape for desktop monitors around ~24", we noticed that 1920x1200 is definitely on the way out, as more and more models are coming out as native 1080p. It's for this reason that we chose it. Finally, for high-end gamers, we also benchmark using 2560x1600, a resolution that's just about 2x 1080p. For graphics cards that include less than 1GB of GDDR, we omit Grand Theft Auto IV from our testing, as our chosen detail settings require at least 800MB of available graphics memory. Also, if the card we're benchmarking doesn't offer the performance to handle 2560x1600 across most of our titles reliably, only 1680x1050 and 1920x1080 will be utilized. Because we value results generated by real-world testing, we don't utilize timedemos whatsoever. The possible exception might be Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage. Though it's not a game, it essentially acts as a robust timedemo. We choose to use it as it's a standard where GPU reviews are concerned, and we don't want to rid our readers of results they expect to see. All of our results are captured with the help of Beepa's FRAPS 2.98, while stress-testing and temperature-monitoring is handled by OCCT 3.1.0 and GPU-Z, respectively. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. Crysis Warhead. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. Grand Theft Auto IV. Race Driver: GRID. World in Conflict: Soviet Assault. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2] When the original Call of Duty game launched in 2003, Infinity Ward was an unknown. Naturally... it was the company's first title. But since then, the series and company alike have become household names. Not only has the series delivered consistently incredible gameplay, it's pushed the graphics envelope with each successive release, and where Modern Warfare is concerned, it's also had a rich storyline. The first two titles might have been built on the already-outdated Quake III engine, but since then, the games have been built with improved graphical features, capable of pushing the...

PowerColor Radeon HD 5870 PCS+

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Rob Williams