Prices on the ATI cards are dropping steadily throughout the recent months, causing vendors worldwide to start pushing sales on them. PowerColor is no stranger to us, but the last time we saw one of their cards was in 2007. Their reappearance may have been propelled by the shift of popularity in the graphics card market. However, one can only speculate. Regardless, we have with us a HD 3870 for this month review. Read on.
Unlike most other brand packaging, PowerColor’s box is a compact one. This could either mean they’ve really optimised the available space, or there isn’t much in the box. Unfortunately, it’s the latter. We only found one VGA-DVI adapter, one dual Molex-PCIe power connector and a HDMI-DVI dongle. This is probably to reduce overall cost.
This version of the HD 3870 is dubbed with a PCS suffix, which stands for Professional Cooling System. It mainly consists of a ZEROtherm heatpipe cooling fan, which is mounted directly on the GPU. The cooling fan works two ways – air is drawn in to the centre and absorbs the heat while traveling outwards, and heat is conducted to the fins which is then dissipated into the surrounding air. In theory, this should enhance cooling efficiency way better than the reference cooler. As for the memory chips, all eight of them are covered by a separate flat copper plate. It was surprising that PowerColor didn’t connect the copper plate to the cooling fan as that would have helped conduct the heat away from the chips as well. At the same time, they added a passive heatsink over the voltage regulators and used Solid Polymer capacitors.
PowerColor also did some overclocking back at their factory. The HD 3870 PCS runs at 800MHz instead of 775Mhz stock speed, while its GDDR4 memory clocks in at 1,170MHz compared to its stock speed of 1,126MHz. However, the boost in performance is only about 3%.
During installation, we encountered some problems starting PowerColor’s driver setup, so we had to resort to using the latest drivers from AMD. The ZEROtherm heatpipe cooling fan did a great job in keeping the card cool. We recorded a temperature increase from 36°C to 50°C using RivaTuner. If you’re worried about noise, don’t be. The fan was extremely quiet even during our benchmarking. Being one of the higher end cards in the market, we expected good performance and that’s what the HD 3870 PCS achieved. The card did very well at lower resolutions but remember to lower some of the quality settings to obtain smooth gameplay at higher resolutions.
The HD 3870 PCS doesn’t come up to par with the GeForce 8800GT, but its cheaper price tag is the attention grabber. Taking a look at the pricelists available, some of the overclocked 8800GTs in the market go above $238. Even then, other overclocked HD 3870 cards are a bit more expensive then PowerColor’s price tag of $208. With a great cooling solution and satisfactory performance, PowerColor’s HD 3870 PCS is quite a value-added product.
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