Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 have been on the market for some time now and the first customized solutions from AIBs (Add-In-Board Partners) are showing up. Last week we tested the Sapphire HD 4850 Toxic, today we have the Powercolor PCS 4850.

Just like on previous products, Powercolor has chosen to use a full copper cooler made by Zerotherm. According to Powercolor the price "for the retailers should not change at all or not much, maybe $5" compared to Powercolor's HD 4850 reference design. So this means that the merchants will buy the card at the same price, but can charge you more because it is a premium product and they want to make more money.

Actually Powercolor is replacing all the reference design cards with products from their new Series: PCS (overclocked), SCS (passive, noiseless) and Play! (Displayport, HDMI).

Packaging & Contents

Powercolor uses their established package design. I find the "HDMI" statement on the front a bit bold, many people could think that the card has native HDMI output, even though it requires an adapter (which is included though).



You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Manual + Driver CD
• DVI Adapter + HDMI Adapter + S-Video Adapter
• TV out cable
• 2x CrossFire bridge (why two?)

The Card

You can quickly see the major change of the PowerColor PCS 4850 when compared to the reference design: the big copper cooler is made by Zerotherm and brings the card's height to two slots.


The card has two DVI ports, basically the most common output configuration these days. In case you need an analog VGA port you can use the included DVI adapter. When using an HDMI adapter (also included), you will also have access to HDMI+HDCP+Audio, which allows easy setup of a media PC. All recent ATI Radeon cards have a Realtek HD Audio device integrated inside the GPU silicon. This means that you don't have to connect any additional cabling to the graphics card for HDMI Audio. A new feature of the HD 4xxx Series is support for 7.1 HDMI audio, the older HD 3xxx cards supported only 5.1.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

Powercolor's cooler uses two heatpipes to transport heat away from the GPU core fast. The two heatpipes go around the fan, connected to copper fins for improved heat transfer.
The other components on the card are cooled by passive heatsinks. Given the cooler design there is plenty of airflow over them. I tried to remove the copper plates that sit on the memory but the thermal tape is so strong I was afraid I would break the memory.


The PowerColor PCS 4850 can be combined with any other HD 4850 card to form a dual, triple or quad CrossFire setup.


A single six pin power connector supplies the required juice for the card. It is required for operation.

Here you would usually expect a photo of the memory chips. Since the copper plate on them is attached so strong I didn't dare to remove it. According to PowerColor, the memory used is BGA GDDR3 from Hynix with 1.0 ns.


The RV770 graphics processor is made by TSMC Taiwan in a 55 nm process.