Introduction

In October 2010, AMD released their Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870 which are based on the Barts GPU core. At its time it was an outstanding choice for the $250 segment, but NVIDIA countered this offer with their GeForce GTX 560 Ti which quickly took over that market.
Now AMD board partners are coming out with feature-rich, highly overclocked versions of the HD 6870 that try to increase the model's competitiveness.
PowerColor has a long history of creating overclocked boards with their PCS, PCS+ and PCS++ Series. Today we have on our testbench the PowerColor HD 6870 PCS++ which comes with a revamped board design and runs at the highest clock speeds available on any HD 6870 today. Pricing seems reasonable too, with just a small price increase over the reference design HD 6870 cards.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• Mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort Adapter
• DVI to Analog VGA Adapter
• CrossFire Bridge

The Card

PowerColor's HD 6870 PCS++ uses the same cooler as the PCS+ version, with the exception that the left side of this "racecar lookalike" cooler is painted in a brighter orange.


The card requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports, one full size HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPort outputs. AMD's display output logic is clearly superior to what NVIDIA has to offer at this time. Vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links) - and use them all at the same time. AMD has also introduced DisplayPort 1.2 support with their new cards which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.

An HDMI sound device is also included in the GPU. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit output. The new revision also brings support for Blu-ray 3D movies which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-ray 3D titles shipping.


Interesting! This is the first HD 68xx card with two CrossFire fingers that I've seen. Normally HD 6850 and HD 6870 have only one, with allows a maximum CF configuration of two cards. We're waiting for confirmation from PowerColor.


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.