Powercolor is a company well known for non reference ATI cards. Today, we are lucky to bring you just an article on PowerColor's Radeon HD 4870 water cooled card, also knows as the LCS edition. We're saying lucky because only 200 units will be launched, and as such it is surely a treat. Due to being a limited edition, PowerColor not only came with a custom cooling solution, jumping into the water though also increased both the core and memory clock speed to make this the fastest Radeon HD 4870 graphics accelerator. And in short that was the main purpose behind the LCS version, which they did achive easily by opting for a custom liquid cooling solution and some minor overclocking. - FudZilla

PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 Limited Version Review

Unlike many high-end water cooled graphics card we've seen lately, PowerColor decided to launch a new product that doesn't feature its own water pump and radiator. This is not a bad idea as most users who would go for this card already have their own water cooling setup. This of course slashes some serious dollars off of the price as all you get is the water block. The video card's water block is specially manufactured for the PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 by EK water blocks. Since the card is based on a non reference PCB, this water block won't fit on any other of the Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards on the market.

The Radeon HD 4870's ticker is as you all know the RV770 graphics processor, which is built on the 55nm process. It has 800 shader processors at its disposal, which is 2.5x more shader processors compared to the last generation, the well known Radeon HD 3800 series. The same goes for texture units, and while the Radeon HD 3800 series had only 16 units, the Radeon HD 4800 series packs 40 in total. AMD's latest drivers come with Avivo converter that runs on both Radeon HD 4800 and HD 4600 generation cards, so if you often find yourself converting video, you can now put your graphics card to good use.

Unlike the reference Radeon HD 4870 which runs at 750MHz for the GPU and 3600MHz for the memory, the PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 LCS version comes factory overclocked to 800MHz for the GPU and 3800MHz for the memory. The video card is powered just like the reference card via two 6-pin PCI Express connectors. The box is small but quite refreshing and it packs a lot of stuff inside. We easily overclocked the card to 850MHz, maximum allowed by the Catalyst drivers. Unfortunately, the memory couldn't handle maximum allowed speed of 4400MHz effectively, but it ran stable at 4200MHz effective.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 LCS edition is undoubtedly the fastest Radeon HD 4870 graphics card around, but it will probably be difficult to acquire as only 200 of these babies will be launched. A simple overclock to 850MHz for the GPU and 4200MHz effective for the memory are proof of EK water blocks excellent performance. The fact remains that this will be one of more expensive Radeon HD 4870 cards and that you should already own some water cooling system. The card is currently listed at around $450. This does make a bit more expensive than the usal reference Radeon HD 4870, but the cooler itself is worth it.

Note that this is a single slot card, but that's not that important since this is the fastest Radeon HD 4870 card that can, depending on the quality of water cooling, easily be overclocked. The only potential downside is the fact that PowerColor didn't put 1GB of memory on this card, which would have been great especially for high resolution gaming. Still, and we can't stress this enough, it's still the fastest Radeon HD 4870 graphics card around.