PowerColor Radeon HD 6870x2 2GB Overclocked Video Card Review

By: Shawn Baker (more) | Video Cards Content | Posted: Jul 28, 2011 4:50 am

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TweakTown Rating: 90% Manufacturer: PowerColor

Card Pictures

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Looking at the card, you can of course see we're dealing with quite a large one here with a massive heatsink/fan setup. PowerColor have opted for two fans and you can see the one on the left is slightly larger than the one on the right.

The other big stand out for the card is the massive copper heatpipe setup that is going on. You can see it running across the top and bottom of the card and it really makes for a mean looking card, which is something we always love.

Moving our way around the card, you can see in the back corner we've got two power connectors. It comes as no surprise that the connection requirement is a little bigger than your standard HD 6870 with two 8-Pin connectors present. Looking back at the bundle, you can see that PowerColor included two 6-Pin to 8-Pin convertors, so if you don't have 8-Pin connectors, you're not going to be running into any problems.

Moving to the front of the card, you can see we've got a single CrossFire connector. Being a Dual GPU card of course means that only two can be supported in CrossFire, giving us a maximum of four GPUs when running CrossFireX.

Connectivity isn't unusual, but it is strong. We can see that PowerColor has opted for two DVI connectors, a single HDMI port and two mini DP ports. This setup allows the card to run up to four monitors in Eyefinity.

Specifications

Looking at the HD 6870x2 out of the box, it comes as no surprise that PowerColor have opted for just stock clocks which means we've got 900MHz on the core and 4200MHz QDR on the 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Because of the default clock speeds, we figured you're not going to be looking at much more than two HD 6870s running at stock speeds. So for that reason, we decided to overclock the card and see what we could do.

Bumping our voltage up to 1.299v on the cores, we ended up with a core clock of 1000MHz, while our 2GB of GDDR5 ended up coming in at 5GHz QDR. This is a strong overclock and we should see some really good performance from the card. It will be interesting to see how we go in our benchmarks.