PowerColor Radeon 5870 PCS+ (CrossFire and Eyefinity) Review

The Radeon 5870 was launched just over a year ago and since then has proven to be a popular DirectX11 card. During that time AMD have been able to optimise their drivers for the architecture and manufacturers have been able to release enhanced versions of the card which have faster core/memory speeds and quieter coolers which run at a lower temperature than the original model. When we then consider that these cards retail for a significantly lower price than the original stock models they become an attractive purchase and a viable option for setting up a very powerful multi-GPU system.

To look at how much performance we can get from this setup today we have two of PowerColor's Radeon 5870 PCS+ cards on our test bench. We will be running them through 1920x1080 and 5760x1080 tests in a number of the latest games, including Civilisation 5 and F1 2010 to see what the user experience is like. In addition to this we also look at GPU computing and HD playback to get a full overview of the PowerColor model.