We first took a look at the PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 video card back in July, shortly after the official release of AMD's much anticipated Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 series GPU's. We concluded that, on balance and at that time, it was a better choice than its NVIDIA rivals and we gave it our gaming award. Moving on we see that several brands has released some special version that come with custom cooling and clock speeds. Of course having their own particular design to improve performance and gaming experience. With a price premium of circa $30 above the cost of a reference clocked Radeon HD 4850, does the PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 PCS+ deliver enough to warrant its increased price? - Hexus

PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 PCS+ CrossFire Review

Sporting a ZEROtherm supplied heatsink with fan and running a firm but mildly overclocked core speed of just 665MHz on the GPU, the orange coloured fan contrasts nicely against the ATI red colored PCB. The memory, unlike the GPU, remains at AMD's reference clocks of 1986MHz however. Unlike the top of the card, the bottom looks pretty much as expected, except for the obvious lack of a torsion beam mounting brace. Instead, four spring loaded screws are what mount the cooler to the GPU with sufficient pressure. The PCS+ edition is equipped with ZEROtherm's cooler, and it's effectively silent even under gaming load.

To help cool the remaining hot components on the PCB such as the voltage circuitry and memory modules, and PowerColor has utilised a couple of heat spreaders and aluminium heatsinks that are just about adequate for the job. With the exception of the larger aluminium heatsink, these all got rather toasty during operation. With the spring-loaded screws that protrude from the bottom of this card, it would be prudent to avoid running two of these in CrossFire unless the motherboard has a single slot gap between each PCI Express slot, otherwise there's a high probability they might foul on the primary card's fan blades.

With the weakest cooling performance of all the pre-overclocked Radeon HD 4850's we've currently seen, its no surprise to find that trying to push the clocks even further wasn't a great success. We just got a modest increase of 27MHz on the GPU and 56MHz on the memory isn't going to shatter any records. Though the gaming performance results did see a nice jump in frame rates, and this implies that not only did the memory clock increase provide a healthy boost to performance. If you are looking for arguably the quietest air cooled Radeon HD 4850 around, then the PowerColor Radeon HD 4850 PCS+ version works well.

If however, as we suspect, the majority of people will want a card with the best bang for buck, coupled with a cooler that doesn't threaten to give you blisters any time you touch it, then the PowerColor PCS+ edition isn't for you. Add this to a very average warranty and there's little reason to recommend this board over, the HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ4 TurboX or the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 Toxic, especially when both of these cards have more efficient coolers and higher pre-overclocked frequencies yet cost around the same money from e-tailers.