Introduction

About three months ago AMD released their new Radeon HD 5800 Series of graphics cards which quickly became a big success due to the numerous improvements made over previous generations. Up to now all cards available from all manufacturers were reference design cards which means they were all made to the same specifications, using the same components and then a sticker was added on the cooler depending on the AIB.

Now Powercolor is one of the first AIBs to release a custom HD 5850 designed card that uses both a non-reference cooler and a non-reference PCB design. While this allows for considerable production optimizations and reduce manufacturing cost it also introduces the risk that the product might not work as optimally as intended by AMD.

Powercolor is actually going beyond the reference design specs and offers higher clock speeds of 760 / 1050 vs. 725 / 1000 on the normal cards. While not making a huge difference it should still give a little extra performance boost to the card.

Packaging

Powercolor's package uses a clean design which does look a bit dull in my opinion, the front conveys all the important product highlights even though the + on PCS Plus (indicating overclocked) is a bit small.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide
• DiRT 2 Coupon
• CrossFire Bridge
• DVI Adapter

The Card

Powercolor's cooler is huge and covers the whole card. You can easily see where the heat pipes are located that help with the heat transfer. However, in my opinion, it can not compete with the looks of AMD's reference design cooler. It should also be noted that the heatpipes add quite a bit of size to the card, which could cause a problem with the side panels in some smaller cases.


Just like the AMD reference design, the cooler occupies two slots.


The card has two DVI ports, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort. This seems to be the output configuration of choice on AMD's new products, even though AIBs have a lot of freedom to choose what exactly they want to use the six available TMDS links on,
For HDMI Audio, most NVIDIA cards require you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.


CrossFire links can be established with any other HD 5800 Series card. Please note that all cards will sync to the lowest common memory size, and possibly even the same clock speed, which is not fully confirmed though.


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.