PowerColor PCS+ HD7950 Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅31-01-12
Conclusion
It's not very often we get a cut-down version of a graphics card outstripping it's bigger brother but today is just one of those days. The PowerColor PCS+ HD7950 in stock form already arrives with a somewhat conservative pre-overclock which is no bad thing as it allowed the card to beat the other HD7950's on test. Having a custom cooler usually means the card can be kept cool under the most extreme overclocking scenarios and I am happy to report the PowerColor PCS+ cooler certainly did not disappoint because with the monster 1160MHz overclock on the core, the temperatures remained very comfortable. The twin 92mm fans were also quiet in operation, perhaps quietest out of the three HD7950's we have tested thus far despite the PowerColor card having to deal with more heat.



I could sit here, the night before NDA, waxing lyrical about just how good this card is but truth be told, I'm very tired and if you haven't already noticed, the results quite simply speak for themselves. For a single, trimmed back version of a graphics card to not only beat the dual core power hungry monolithic HD6990 on occasions but also take it's bigger brother, the HD7970 by the scruff of the neck is quite a feat. The card finished top of the pile on numerous occasions and while it cannot lay claim to being the fastest overall card on test in every game, it comes really close. Not bad for a supposed castrated graphics card!

So, where's the bad news? Well the packaging could do with a few little tweaks as compared to other products it is a little lacking. Power consumption figures could be better. A free game perhaps? As you can probably tell, I'm struggling to find any bad points here as the card has pretty much blown me away, such is it's performance. Priced at 420 Euros it is not going to be cheap so I would expect to pay around 400 of your best British pounds. For that you could easily get a GTX580 or indeed for a little more, the HD7970 however as we have seen in our tests, the HD7950 managed the impossible by squarely beating the overclocked reference AMD HD7970 on majority of occasions. It appears the old adage of you get what you pay for rings true here.

So, overall what you have here is a monster overclocker, it is cool in both senses of the word and while not a budget card, it represents value in terms of performance at the high end of the scale. What more is there to say other than this is a clear example of a Platinum award winning graphics card!

Pros:
+ Best in class GPU core overclocking
+ Great memory overclocking
+ Good cooling
+ Outstanding performance
+ Very quiet operation
+ Lush looking design
+ Black PCB

Cons:
- Only one DVI port







Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net. Thanks to PowerColor for providing today’s review sample.

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