PowerColor Radeon HD 5850 PCS+

Last week we took a look at a rather unique product from PowerColor, the 5750 Go! Green. With that card PowerColor were targeting consumers who wanted silence, it was passively cooled, along with those who are conscious of their power use and green credentials. To appeal to the latter PowerColor redesigned the card to ensure low power use, so much so that it no longer required a 6-pin PCIe power connector. They also ensure that it adhered to e-waste, RoHS and lead free guidelines.

Today's review product takes a different approach as it is designed to appeal to enthusiasts who want the best performance for their money. The 5850 PCS+ is a factory overclocked model with enhanced cooler and we will be putting it thorough a selection of real world tests, including StarCraft 2, to establish how it compares to the best 5830 on the market. In addition to this we will also take a look at how both cards perform in the recently released Mafia 2 and Lost Planet 2 benchmarks before concluding with some 3D Blu-Ray playback and GPU computing tasks.