When Powercolor first approached me about their new Radeon HD 5850 PCS+ I was very sceptical and wondered what could be improved on a nearly perfect product. Now that the review is done, I have to applaud Powercolor for successfully achieving that goal. The two basic cornerstones of PCS+ are Professional Cooling System and + for overclocked out of the box. The cooler offers excellent performance, temperatures are ultra-low, yet the card still runs comfortably quiet. In idle it is quieter than any other card from our test group from all performance segments. Under load the fan ramps up a bit but it still quieter than everything else that offers similar performance.
Powercolor's overclock out of the box is not so impressive. The overclock is quite slim and results only in a 2% performance increase which is something you will not notice in your games. Adding 2% to 30 FPS gives you 30.6 FPS, hardly any difference. When overclocked manually we reached considerably better results of 950 MHz on the core and 1200 MHz on the memory which resulted in a 20% performance increase. However, one has to give credit to Powercolor for going beyond stock clock speeds, even if the difference is small.
Powercolor redesigned the PCB to include different voltage regulator circuitry and other components, while cheaper, this also results in a higher power consumption across the board. In my opinion this should not be blown out of proportion. Even with the power draw increases, the card scores well when compared to other cards.
Overall the Powercolor HD 5850 PCS+ is a great card, that is a worthy alternative to the reference design HD 5850, especially in times like these where supply is limited.