PowerColor 6850 PCS+ Review

Testing:

A proper review could never be complete without a full run through the OverclockersClub.com suite of benchmarks. For graphics cards, we run every unit through a full assortment of synthetic and real life benchmarks and then compare the results to a wide variety of today's cards so that we can show exactly where the card lies in relation to everything else on the market. For testing, control panels are left at their defaults other than forced 4x antialiasing and 16x anisotropic in each bench other than 3D Mark. PhysX features are turned off for testing to even the field. Each card is tested at stock speeds and at the highest stable overclock for each card with NVIDIA's 260.89 Forceware drivers and AMD's 10.10 Catalyst drivers.

• Processor: Intel Core I7 920 200x18 3.6GHz
• Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366
• Motherboard: ASUS P6X58D Premium
• Memory: Mushkin 998827 Ridgeback PC3 12800 6-8-6-24 1600MHz
• Video Card: PowerColor HD 6850 PCS+
• Power Supply: CoolerMaster Real Power Pro 850W
• Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
• Optical Drive: Asus DVD-RW
• OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
• Case: Cooler Master HAF 932

Comparison Video Cards:

• NVIDIA GTS 450
• EVGA GTX 460 FTW Edition
• ASUS ENGTX465
• NVIDIA GTX 480
• Galaxy GTX 470 GC
• BFG GTS 250 1GB OC
• Sapphire HD 5970 4GB Toxic
• Sapphire HD 5970 2GB
• Sapphire HD 5870
• Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic 2GB
• Sapphire HD 5770 VaporX
• Sapphire HD 5750 VaporX
• Sapphire HD 6870
• XFX HD 6850

Overclocking:

• PowerColor HD 6850 PCS+  974/1201MHz

Considering this card's already strong factory overclock, I wasn't sure what to expect going into overclocking. Unfortunately, none of the programs out right now supported voltage tweaking on this card as of writing. With an OC to 974MHz on the core, and 1201MHz on the RAM, I am getting 2MHz higher than the recently reviewed XFX HD 6850 Black Edition, and 42MHz higher on the RAM before voltage tweaks, so I am confident that once support is brought to this card, you could see even more performance boosting. For this card, raising the clock speed 154MHz should show some pretty impressive gains. Even with the fan at 100%, it was not at all annoying like some cooling systems during the previous generation. This card also showed some excellent temperature tolerance because, even with the enhanced cooling solution, the card was hitting 67 degrees Celcius under 100% load, but it never missed a beat.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

MSI's Kombuster utility was used to test stability and to put a constant load on the GPU, for the purposes of testing maximum power draw and temperatures. The stability test was used to find a range of settings that are stable. The stable condition was determined through a 15 minute run at 1920x1200 8xAA. The reported clock speeds are those that proved stable over a 15 minute test at 1920x1200, 8xAA and the run through the benchmarks suite.

• Gaming Tests:

1. Far Cry 2
2. Metro 2033
3. Crysis Warhead
4. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
5. Just Cause 2
6. Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0
7. Batman: Arkham Asylum
8. Resident Evil 5
9. 3DMark 06 Professional
10. 3DMark Vantage

• Usage:

1. Temperature
2. Power Consumption

The maximum clock speed graphs above show the overclocking potential of all the cards tested.