Final thoughts and rating
In spite of the dual-GPU competition from NVIDIA, the Radeon HD 5870 remains our overall choice if contemplating a £300-£350 card.The main question we're answering in this review, therefore, is whether you should you pay an extra £30-£40 for a PowerColor PCS+ Radeon HD 5870 over a standard model, if you're in the market for a high-end graphics card.
First off, performance is solid. The PowerColor PCS+ is faster than the basic GPU because it ships with marginally higher clocks of 875MHz/4,900MHz.
The cooler works more efficiently by reducing both noise and temperatures, and the PCS+ HD 5870 betters Sapphire's also-custom Vapor-X on both counts.
We'd like PowerColor to ship a better bundle and have the card available from a greater number of retailers, but there's little to deny the thermal benefits brought by the gargantuan cooler.
A quality gaming card that has most of the necessary boxes ticked, we reckon it would be a good fit for a premium gaming system.
The good
Quiet cooler
Decent overclocking potential on this sample
The not so good
No direct cooling for memory chips
Bundle is perfunctory
Pre-overclocked frequencies aren't much above default
HEXUS Awards
PowerColor PCS+ Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB
HEXUS Where2Buy
The PowerColor PCS+ Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB graphics card can be ordered from the following retailers:
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HEXUS Right2Reply
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