PowerColor PCS+ HD7850 Pro Reviews

At $199 after rebate, the PowerColor PCS+ HD 7850 has competition at this price point from the GTX 660. The reality is that you need to chose the video card you use based on the games you play most as each has its strong points, mainly in the games they share the development work with the developers. Currently there is a promotion that gets the end user a copy of Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider as an added bonus. Any way you look at it PowerColor's PCS+ cooling equipped, factory overclocked HD 7850 delivers excellent gaming performance across the spectrum and comes with an excellent low noise/high performance cooling solution.

For $200, the PowerColor HD 7850 PCS+ has a lot to offer. Being the fastest factory overclocked card, it is able to yield about a 10% improvement over the reference HD 7850. Many people simply want a video card that works and play well in games. The fact that the HD 7850 PCS+ is already overclocked means that buyers can just toss it into the rig and start to enjoy the extra performance. As always, overclocking permits some amount risk so buying a card that is factory overclocked with full full manufacturer warranty always puts an ease of mind for those who do not like the hassle of tinkering with a $200 piece of hardware that potentially can ended up in a dumpster. The custom cooler with its SS-shaped design does its job really well at keeping the noise-level to bare minimum at idle and low under load. It also helped to leave plenty of overclocking potential for those who are inclined to push it even further. In our limited time of testing, we could easily push the clockspeed to 25% from the already overclocked setting, which is pretty impressive. Despite the fact that the PowerColor HD 7850+ is slightly more expensive, we think it is one of the best HD 7850 on the market. We like the display ports mix on the card and the included mini DisplayPort adapter is handy to have for those who are seeking to run multiple monitors. The added value bundle along with the factory overclocking is well-worth the extra $35. The card is not perfect as the protrusion on the top of the card may presents problem for small form factor PC but we do not think it will affect most people. The lack of overclocking tool and two year warranty is also minor complain. However, all in all, the PowerColor HD 7850 PCS+ certainly worth your consideration if you are on the market for a midrange graphic card.

PowerColor's HD 7850 PCS+ is the highest clocked HD 7850 you can find on the market. Being backed by gigahertz GPU clocks the card delivers an excellent performance improvement over the AMD HD 7850 reference design - 8% averaged over our testing. This puts the card on the same performance levels as GTX 480 or HD 6970, at a lower price. Despite the large out-of-the-box overclock, there is some additional manual overclocking potential which is among the best of all HD 7850 cards we tested so far. Higher clocks come with higher power consumption, which can end up being quite big on super overclocked custom cards, but it seems PowerColor did a good job with their design, so the power draw increase is nothing to worry about - around 20 W during gaming. Thanks to the PCS+ cooler and good fan settings in BIOS, the card runs extremely quiet in idle and at low noise levels under load. PowerColor did a good job here.

Truth be told, AMD's Radeon HD 7850 isn't a giant step up from previous-generation cards. If you're using performance and price as your primary metric, you'll find little difference between AMD's new HD 7850 and NVIDIA's 16-month-old GeForce GTX 570 - they cost roughly £200 apiece and deliver a similar amount of graphical oomph in today's latest games. Upgrading from the old to the new doesn't make a lot of sense, but if you're coming from a card that's two or three generations behind, AMD's Radeon HD 7850 is in our estimation the most appealing sub-£200 solution on the market today. Delivering good 1080p performance, coupled with the latest multimedia capabilities and excellent power-draw characteristics, AMD's 28nm solution is well-rounded and performs well in all areas.