Last month, AMD which pioneered DirectX 11 compliant PC consumer graphics, released its second generation Radeon HD 6800 architecture, under codename Northern Islands. The company has enjoyed a six month head start into this race for DirectX 11 graphics hardware market dominance, which also reflected in both growth of market share and domination with sales. The time passed by allowed AMD to refine and fine tune its new architecture to better suit the existing 40nm silicon fabrication process, by promising to churn out just higher performance per Watt and also performance per die area, compared to their previous generation Evergreen architecture leading to more cost effective products. - techPowerUp

PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 1GB PCS+ Style Review

This new PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 PCS+ edition is a fully custom Radeon HD 6850 design. It actually uses an different PCB, different voltage regulator and thermal solution than the AMD reference version. The most important points for the Radeon HD 6850 PCS+ version are a clock speed boost of 820MHz core and 4400MHz memory, which is a nice improvement. There is not much to say about PowerColor's package, it is easily recognizable as such and communicates their most basic product highlights. With that being looked at, the PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 PCS+ edition uses a cooler that resembles a racecar chassis.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 PCS+ version is the first to reach our labs that uses a heavily modified PCB design. PowerColor has chosen to replace the CHiL voltage regulator with one from uPi which is considerably cheaper though doesn't offer the extensive software voltage control features of the default CHiL controller. This means that overclockers who want to play with voltages will be out of luck with this board. The overclocking potential on the Radeon HD 6850 PCS+ edition is decent, and comparable to other Radeon HD 6850 cards we have seen so far. Where the PowerColor card can excel is fan noise under load.

With only 31dbA it is substantially much quieter than any other Radeon HD 6800 series card we checked so far. Unfortunately idle fan noise has not received the low noise treatment, meaning it is as noisy as many others. While the out of the box overclock is rather slim which seems to be more a political limitation from AMD than PowerColor's own choosing. The Overdrive limits are alright, especially when considering that the graphics card has no voltage control. Other than that, the Radeon HD 6850 PCS+ version is a solid implementation of a custom design that leads the reference implementation with a performance increase.

Whether this is enough for you to justify the increased cost of $10-15 depends mostly on whether you are willing to do some overclocking on your own or if you just want to get going with gaming. Hardcore overclockers should stay away from this card though because of the missing GPU voltage control. Personally we find the price a bit too high for what is offered. If the graphics card was priced at $179 then PowerColor could certainly gain some momentum from non overclockers who simply want a fast and robust card without going too much into tweaking.