PowerColor is one of the first ATI partners to release their own Radeon HD 4890 design called PCS which features a non reference cooler and custom PCB. AMD has made clear that their RV790 will have plenty of overclocking potential, so PowerColor went all out and is shipping their Radeon HD 4890 PCS edition with stock clocks of 950MHz core and 4400MHz memory. As cooler a solution from ZEROtherm is used. Last but not least, the voltage controller design has been changed as well, most probably to reduce cost significantly. All this results in a board that will not cost more than most reference cards. That alone is already a great added value, now it just have to deliver the performance. - techPowerUp

PowerColor Radeon HD 4890 1GB PCS+ Style Review

When looking at the box PowerColor simply reused their Radoen HD 4890 package and slapped a PCS sticker on of it. Like the Radeon HD 4890 reference design, the cooler uses two slots. Unlike the reference design it only cools their GPU and not other components. Due to the cooler design there is some airflow going to the PCB which helps with cooling. The card has two DVI ports, the most common output configuration today. If you want to use the card with your big TV screen you can use the included HDMI adapter. In case you need an analog port you can also use the included DVI adapter.

And you may combine up to four Radeon HD 4890 cards in CrossFireX for better performance and image quality. It is also possible to combine Radeon HD 4890 boards with other Radeon HD 4800 series but you will take a performance hit because of the mismatched CrossFire configuration. The cooler installed on the PowerColor Radeon HD 4890 PCS edition is provided by ZEROtherm. The base makes contact with the GPU core and four heatpipes are used to transport the heat away to a large number of cooling fins. And the memory chips are cooled by little metal plates that act as heatspreader, which just get the job done.

Two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors are required to supply additional power to the graphics card. The voltage regulator area is cooled by a tall copper colored heatsink, which is not real copper either. Their GDDR5 memory chips are made by Qimonda and carry a cycle time of 1.0ns, which means they are specified to run at 4000MHz. So due to the improved PCB design PowerColor can offer their Radeon HD 4890 PCS version for the price of a normal reference design board. PowerColor's HD 4890 PCS can impress with great performance right out of the box. In benchmarks we saw its performance on par with the GeForce GTX 275.

Unfortunately the performance increase comes at the cost of power draw. In both idle and load the card draws a lot of power, making it the least efficient board in our test group when considering performance per Watt. After installing a new BIOS we were impressed by the quiet idle fan noise that the Radeon HD 4890 PCS version emitted. Unfortunately the picture changes dramatically under load. The card often gets stuck between two fan speed levels which results in constant fan speed changes in very short intervals. As a result the fan speed draws much more attention to it than usually, which is if course quite annoying.

The custom designed PowerColor PCB allowed some freedom in the component selection. Instead of using two expensive Volterra controllers, a single, cheaper, OnSemi controller is used. And as a result PowerColor can offer their card at the same price as normal reference design cards which makes this an interesting deal for many users that are thinking about an upgrade.