PowerColor PCS+ HD7870 (Vortex II Edition) Pro Reviews

We've seen our fair share of Radeon HD 7870s in recent months, and for various reasons, they've had to a tendency to be hit or miss. PowerColor, however, has managed to get a lot right with the HD 7870 Vortex II. Heavily-overclocked and competitively-priced at £230, it's one of the best cards available at this price point and it offers everything you'd expect from a mid-to-high-end solution; including excellent in-game performance at 1080p, low temperatures under load and quiet operation. The card itself is impressive, but has it arrived at an opportune time? On the one hand, new games and AMD driver updates are beginning to realise the full potential of the GCN architecture, but on the other hand, the launch of NVIDIA's rival GeForce GTX 660 Ti is imminent. We'd recommend holding fire until you've seen the bigger picture - our review of the new GeForce will be published soon - but if you're certain the Radeon HD 7870 is the right GPU for you, PowerColor's Vortex II edition is one of the very best.

PowerColor's HD 7870 PCS+ Vortex II is one of the highest clocked HD 7870 cards out there. Thanks to the massive overclock out of the box it has an 8% performance advantage over the HD 7870 reference design. This puts the card on the same performance level as the stock HD 7950. With that much power it's a good choice for maximum details full HD gaming. The increased clocks result in a higher gaming power draw which was to be expected, even though the increase is a bit higher than performance delivered, resulting in worse performance per Watt, which still very reasonable in my opinion. Idle power consumption is excellent, it seems PowerColor has done some nice optimizations here. Unfortunately they messed up the multi-monitor and Blu-ray voltage profiles, the card runs full 3D voltage, even though idle voltages would be sufficient. This results in extra power draw in that scenario.