PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 PCS+ Review - PAGE 16

Temprature:

To measure core GPU temperature, MSI's Kombustor was used. The idle temperature was taken after leaving nothing running for up to 15 minutes. The load temperature was taken 15 minutes after starting Kombuster for Multi-Core graphics cards.

The operating temperature of the PoweColor HD 6850 PCS+ was very good at both stock and overclocked settings. We didn't see a 15% decrease in temperature over the reference model, but the PowerColor card has higher frequencies than the reference HD 6850. The best aspect about the included cooler is that it operates at a near silent level when rotating at low RPM, but is still very quiet even when the fan is at full rotation.

Power Usage:

To measure power usage, a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter was used. Note that the above numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we took the sustained peak power drain readings at the end of a 30 minute Kombustor run.

Power usage was also very good. The PowerColor card was able to maintain a lower power rating than the HD 6870 even after being overclocked past 9000MHz.

Conclusion:

The HD 6850 even in reference form is a very capable graphics card that has an in-game performance level rivaling cards that commanded a $350+ premium just a year ago. The PowerColor HD 6850+ is no reference card though, as this model boasts GPU and memory clock speeds of 820MHz and 1100MHz respectively. With these settings the PowerColor HD 6850 was able to handily outperform the reference model and do so with a lower operating temperature and sound level. This essentially means that owners of this card will have increased performance, cooling and acoustics out-of-the-box with no additional tweaking required. PowerColor is also including a free copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which enhances the overall price to price ratio even when taking into account the price increase between this card and reference models.

In addition to the improved gaming performance, the HD 6850 uses the new Barts Pro graphics processor which includes all of the latest AMD architectural improvements. These consist of improved parallel processing, DX11 performance, Morphological-AA, and a new UVD3 decoder which adds acceleration for Blu-ray and DivX HD. AMD has also improved upon the Eyefinity technology, as the 6800 series graphics cards utilize the latest DisplayPort capable of supporting up to three monitors per connection. This will make Eyefinity easier to setup and will eliminate the problem of having to use multiple connection types to properly run Eyefinity.

The PowerColor HD 6850 PCS+ ships with a factory overclock, of 820MHz, but I found it to have plenty of additional overclocking headroom. After spending the better part of an hour raising frequencies and running stability tests, this card was capable of achieving speeds well beyond the factory HD 6870 levels. The final GPU clock speed was capable of running all the tested games, benchmarks and stability test at 981MHz, and the memory was stable at 1204MHz. These settings were very impressive for a graphics card that doesn’t include any voltage control options.

One thing I did find off about this card was that a temperature decrease was observed after an aftermarket thermal paste was applied. After removing the cooler to take pictures of the bare PCB, I applied a new thermal compound to the GPU and placed the card back into my system. With the new thermal compound, there was a drop in temperature that fluctuated between 3°C and 6°C when the GPU was stressed. Even though the aftermarket thermal paste offered better overall cooling, the included cooler with the stock TIM was very efficient. One other issue is the included Call of Duty game is quickly becoming an old title, and some might not feel it warrants a higher premium for the overall package at this point.

In all this is an exceptional graphics card based on the Barts Pro GPU, featuring improved performance, cooling and acoustics over the reference design. Add to this a free game and it all adds up to make this model well worth the asking price and deserving of our recommendation.