PowerColor Radeon HD 6770 PCS+ Vortex II Graphics Card Review

We are always keen to look at cards that offer something unique to the table, and don’t just follow a reference design, and even though this is the first PowerColor card we’ve looked at, it certainly impresses from the get go. The cooler is unlike anything else on the market and by coincidence, follows the AMD red and black colours with a matching red PCB. The cooler includes a large PowerColor branded fan which partially covers over the aluminium heatsink.

The top of the card shows the two heatpipes that connect into the copper baseplate which makes direct contact with the GPU and help to dissipate heat to the edges of the heatsink for the best thermal conductivity.

Being a 6770 underneath, it only requires little power and thus only needs a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector.

Moving along the top of the card we see two CrossFire connectors for multiple GPU configurations, and PowerColor also bundle in a single CrossFire connector so that you’re ready to go once you buy another 6770 based card.

Certain brands on the market have stuck with an original design and that is the case with the connections too, offering up only three display outputs. PowerColor however have implemented four display connectors including a DisplayPort connector, two DVI ports and an HDMI of which all come nicely protected with rubber caps.

Specification wise, the card has a 900MHz core clock speed and 1225MHz memory speed (4.9Gbps) running on a 128-bit memory interface with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. The specs are slightly faster than a stock 6770 with a 50MHz overclock on the core clock speed, and a slight 100MHz effective memory speed increase which is nice to see as a lot of vendors will simply keep the performance of the card at stock, whereas PowerColor have upped that and implemented their fancy cooler too.