Introduction

We've already found ourselves really impressed with what AMD has done with the new Radeon HD 7800 series even in reference form. You can see what we thought of them in our standalone HD 7850 review, standalone HD 7870 review and HD 7870 CrossFire article.

Today, though, we get to move away from the reference card design and see what's going on with our first retail HD 7870 in the form of the PowerColor PCS+ HD 7870 GHz OC Edition 2GB. We haven't seen much from PowerColor in the form of the PCS+ series, but it's always one that has taken my eye.

What's making these new cooling solutions so much more attractive as well is the fact that the new 28nm GPU on the HD 7000 series runs so cool that the latest coolers are seeing some awesome performance on the new models. We've got our fingers crossed that the PCS+ cooler that PowerColor has opted for today follows the trend of strong cooling.

Before we look at the performance of the cooler and the card we've got to first check out the package to see just what PowerColor is offering us. Once we've done that we'll take a closer look at the card itself before getting into the specifications to see just what kind of overclock we've got here today.

From there we'll move on to having a quick look at our testbed, cover the cards we'll be using in our graphs today and then finally get into the performance side of things before we wrap everything up.

Package

The bundle with the PowerColor PCS+ HD 7870 GHz OC Edition isn't that big, but the inclusion of a MiniDP to DP connector instead of the MiniDP to DVI is something that I really like.

We're seeing a lot of companies skip on the MiniDP to DP connector and if you've got yourself a DisplayPort monitor, you could quickly find yourself quite disappointed when opening your new card to discover that you can't use the DP connection until you get an adapter.