PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 PCS+ Review - PAGE 2

Impressions

PowerColor certainly took the HD 5770 to the drawing board and came up with their own twist on the product, with the HD 5770 PCS+. This isn't just a cooler swap; the PCS+ has an entirely re-designed PCB.

While the first editions of the HD 5770 in many ways appeared to be a HD 5870 hit by a shrink-ray, the HD 5770 PCS+ looks like more of a mid-range card, than a high-end offering (that it is). The PCB is about an inch shorter than the reference HD 5770, and while the cooler may be more effective, it has less metal used in its construction. While the PCB probably was shortened to cut cost, it looks like every square millimeter is being used, and the all the components are crammed in there, so this cost-saving measure doubtfully negatively affects anything; if anything smaller is better for those with small cases, or mATX motherboards. 

The PCS cooler in play here is found on a number of other video cards in PowerColor's line-up. We have a fairly standard design here: a 80mm fan with highly curved vanes pushes air directly down, to an array of aluminum heat fins. Beneath the heat fins there is a large copper base-plate, which covers both the GPU, and the memory. We'll see in our thermal testing how this particular cooling solution performs, but for now, we can compliment the cooler on how quiet it is. In normal operation, you just won't hear it. And even when running at 100%, it is still only mildly loud; in fact some of the louder coolers running at stock speeds on some other video cards have been louder than this PCS cooler running at full-bore.

For output connectivity, you have the pretty much unbeatable options of two DVI ports, a DisplayPort, and a HDMI port. Gaming cards do not come with any more options than that. With the HD 5000 series' Eyefinity technology, you can use up to three displays at once, which is a great bonus. While realistically you won't be able to game on any recent games with three displays running off of one HD 5770 without really cutting back the visual quality, nonetheless having a gaming rig with three desktops at once is a great feature.  

Specifications

The PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 PCS+ has 1GB of GDDR5. HD 5770's come in both 512MB and 1GB varieties. Generally speaking, going from 512MB to 1GB doesn't bring much of a performance improvement in games. However that extra 512MB certainly doesn't hurt, and can come in handy sometimes; for example: as someone who runs a lot of virtual machines at home, for myself that extra memory would be very handy to split up into the different VMs. Furthermore the extra memory comes at only a small price premium, so hey PowerColor, bring it on.

Besides the memory, we have 800 stream processors for gaming, and the pretty-high clock speed of 875 MHz for the core. This model is factory-overclocked by PowerColor, but the gains are fairly slight: the core and the memory clock have been boosted 25 MHz.

Additionally, the HD 5770 uses the smallest around 40nm manufacturing process, is DirectX 11 capable, and enjoys the rest of the full feature set of the HD 5000 series, such as Eyefinity, improved tessellation, the UVD engine for HD video playback, OpenGL 3.2 support, a PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface, ATI Powerplay for reduced power usage, and ATI Stream acceleration technology, which speeds up Adobe Flash amongst other things. (Read up on it here.)

Here are the primary specifications for the HD 5770 and other some other options you might be considering: