PowerColor 6850 PCS+ Review

One thing's for sure, AMD is really pushing hard at the mid-range segment right now to eke all it can out of the current recession. When that means better performance for cheaper prices, I'm not complaining! Instead of pushing the 6000 series forward with brute force, AMD is instead focusing this series on efficiency. Its current flagship, the 6870, has some specs that would give the impression of lesser performance when compared to the 5870. However, with AMD's chip advances, the 6000 series handily beats out is older counterparts with much more efficient hardware and processes. In fact, AMD is claiming over 35% more performance per square millimeter over its previous generation of cards. On top of that, AMD is reportedly using 25% less silicon than the 5850. This means more performance requiring less power and generating less heat. Along with the new process technology, AMD is bundling this new generational step with up to 2x faster tessellation and geometry throughput and multiple other features to keep its cards ahead of the game.
With the HD 6850 PCS+, Powercolor is upping its offering beyond just reference designs as per the usual. This time, a much beefier cooling system has been slapped on and fairly substantial overclocks have been applied right out of the box. I am quite excited to see just how well this card stacks up against the slew of other cards saturating the market at this time.

 

 

 

Specifications:

Card	PowerColor HD 6850 PCS+
Core Clock Speed	820MHz
Stream Processors	960
ROP Units	32
Texture Units	48
Transistors	1.7 Billion
Process	40nm
Memory Type	GDDR5
Memory Size	1GB
Memory Clock	1100MHz (4.4GHz)
Outputs	DP, HDMI, Dual DVI
Cooling Type	Custom PCS+ Heat-Pipe

Features:

"Eye-Definition" graphics

• DirectX 11 support
• Shader Model 5.0
• DirectCompute 11
• Programmable hardware tesselation unit
• Accelerated multi-threading
• HDR texture compression
• Order-independent transparency
• OpenGL 4.1 support
• Image quality enhancement technology
• Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
• Adaptive anti-aliasing
• Morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA)
• 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
• 128-bit floating point HDR rendering

AMD Eyefinity Multi-Display Technology (1)

• Independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
• Display grouping
• Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display

AMD EyeSpeed Visual Acceleration (2)

• AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) technology (3,4)
• OpenCL 1.1
• DirectCompute 11
• Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling
• UVD 3 dedicated video playback accelerator
• MPEG-4 AVC/H.264
• VC-1
• MPEG-2 (SD & HD)
• Multi-View Codec (MVC)
• MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, Xvid)
• Adobe Flash
• Enhanced Video Quality features
• Advanced post-processing and scaling
• Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction
• Brighter whites processing (Blue Stretch)
• Independent video gamma control
• Dynamic video range control
• Dual-Stream HD (1080p) playback support
• DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support

AMD HD3D technology (5)

• Stereoscopic 3D display/glasses support
• Blu-ray 3D support
• Stereoscopic 3D gaming
• 3rd party Stereoscopic 3D middleware software support

AMD CrossFireXTM Multi-GPU Technology (6)

• Dual GPU Scaling

Cutting-edge integrated display support

• DisplayPort 1.2
• Max resolution 2560x1600 per display
• Multi-Stream Transport
• 21.6 Gbps bandwidth
• High bit-rate audio
• HDMI 1.4a with Stereoscopic 3D Frame Packing Format, Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
• Max resolution: 1920x1200
• Dual-link DVI with HDCP
• Max resolution: 2560x1600
• VGA
• Max resolution: 2048x1536

Integrated HD audio controller

• Output protected high bit-rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
• Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats

AMD PowerPlay power management technology (4)

• Dynamic power manegement with low power idle state
• Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations

AMD Catalyst graphics and HD video configuration software

• Unified graphics display drivers
• Certified for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP
• AMD Catalyst Control Center
• Software application and user interface for setup, configuration, and accessing special features of AMD Radeon products

1. AMD Eyefinity technology works with games that support non-standard aspect ratios, which is required for panning across multiple displays. To enable more than two displays, additional panels with native DisplayPortTM connectors, and/or DisplayPortTM compliant active adapters to convert your monitor’s native input to your cards DisplayPortTM or Mini-DisplayPort? connector(s), are required. SLS ("Single Large Surface") functionality requires an identical display resolution on all configured displays.
2. AMD EyeSpeed is a set of technologies designed to improve video quality and enhance application performance. Full enablement of some features requires support for AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) technology and/or AMD’s Universal Video Decoder (UVD).
3. AMD PowerPlayTM and AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) are technology platforms that include a broad set of capabilities offered by certain AMD Radeon? HD GPUs. Not all products have all features and full enablement of some capabilities and may require complementary products.
4. Requires application support for AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) technology. AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing technology works with applications designed to take advantage of its GPU acceleration capabilities.
5. AMD HD3D is a technology designed to enable stereoscopic 3D support in games, movies and/or photos. Requires 3D stereo drivers, glasses, and display.
6. AMD CrossFireX? technology requires an AMD CrossFireX Ready motherboard, an AMD CrossFireXTM Bridge Interconnect (for each additional graphics card) and may require a specialized power supply.