Too Fast and Cool to be True?

Since time immemorial, man has had an insatiable appetite for power and speed. This can be easily appreciated when you look at modern day transport. From horse carriages of the days of yore, to cars, to maglev trains, to airplanes, the only limits that stand in man's way are the laws of physics. This lust for power and speed can be seen in computing as well, giving birth to faster processors, faster memory and of course faster graphics cards. As we've seen in our earlier review, the standard Radeon HD 4870 is already a very capable performer, providing more than enough graphics processing power for your average or even hardcore gamer. But when was man ever satisfied? Hence overclocking.

However, the inescapable fact is that with more power comes more heat. Therefore, graphics cards require well-designed coolers to ensure that the GPU doesn't become a campfire sitting on your motherboard. This relentless lust for power and speed has now led prominent ATI graphics card manufacturer, PowerColor, to give us this - the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 1GB GDDR5.

The PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 is one of the earliest overclocked versions of the HD 4870 made available to gamers, and is packed in a compact box, which we find tasteful.

The PowerColor PCS+ HD 4870 is an overclocked variant of the standard Radeon HD 4870 which PowerColor claims to be not only faster than the reference, but also cooler. But before we delve into the details of the card, let us first take a look at how the card stacks up against the competition.