PowerColor Radeon HD 6770 PCS+ Vortex II Graphics Card Review

Rewinding time to a few years ago, the Radeon 5770 took centre stage and gave AMD a great boost in sales as it took the market by storm as an affordable mid-range card that had a lot to offer for a great price point. Building on the success of that card, AMD released the next generation in the form of a 6770 offering up slightly improved features and expecting to take the market by storm in the same manner. With Nvidia releasing the likes of the GTX 550 Ti, it was going to be a lot tougher for AMD to compete, especially at a reference level. This is why many more manufacturers on the market are investing time and money into custom coolers, custom PCB's and faster pre-overclocked cards and PowerColor thought they'd give some of their star treatment to the Radeon 6770 by slapping their patented Vortex II cooler on board and bumping up the base clocks slightly to give that extra performance that we all crave, especially when it doesn't cost any extra, right? We've never been fans of mid-range cards, but that's all down to the fact that the staff at eTeknix are enthusiasts through and through, but we do believe that mid-range cards have their place in the market, as not everyone has £400+ to spend on a dual GPU monster like the Radeon 6990 or GTX 590, and for the most part, cards like that would be wasted on most consumers. This is why we find manufacturers releasing these refreshed cards which give the consumer something more than your bog standard reference card. PowerColor are keen to show off their Radeon 6770 PCS+ Vortex II graphics card, and with PowerColor being a new brand to us in the test lab, we're keen to see what it can do and if it's really worth the extra money for a pre-overclocked card with a fancy cooler. The box is mainly black with a muscle car mixed with a PowerColor branded fan freezing part of the box up. The Vortex II side of the card is explained at "Whirlwind Technology" and also has some key featured listed on the box including the memory specification and what typical connections the card has. Turning the box to the side we find the power and system requirements printed in bullet point form. Turning the box around, the back of the box displays the main specifications of the card and then delves into each unique feature that PowerColor have invested into the PCS+ and Vortex II range of cards which mainly comes down to the effective cooling due to the materials used and engineering quality and design. Opening the box up reveals the usual bundled accessories that we see with the majority of cards lately, as simply put, you can't offer much else more with a graphics card unless you are bundling software or a game, which is exactly what PowerColor have done. Inside we find a quick installation guide, driver CD, user manual which explains how to partially remove the Vortex fan to clean the heatsink, CrossFire bridge, DVI to VGA adapter and being the Dirt 3 edition, we also find a Dirt 3 coupon. 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. The test the performance of this card, we use the latest drivers direct from the manufacturer and run each test three times to obtain a fair average set of results. Test System: Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z Intel Core i7 2600k Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 SOC Corsair H80 Corsahir HX1050W Kingston V+100 128GB SSD Lian Li T60 We would like to thank Asus, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Games used: Batman: Arkham Asylum 1920x1080 8xMSAA 16xAF Dirt 2 1920x1080 4xMSAA 16xAF Dirt 3 1920x1080 4xMSAA 16xAF Just Cause 2 1920x1080 4xAA 16xAF Mafia II 1920x1080 AA On 16xAF Metro 2033 1920x1080 4xMSAA 16xAF Hardware used: Plug-in electricity usage monitor Sound level meter Software used: 3DMark 11 Extreme Pre-set 3DMark Vantage Performance Pre-set FurMark 1920x1080 HWMonitor Unigine Heaven Benchmark 1920x1080 4xAA 16xAF Windows 7 Professional 64-bit 3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. 3DMark 11 saw some good results from the 6770 as it edged in front of the 5770's we compared it against and wasn't too far behind the 5830 Xtreme. 3DMark Vantage is the industry standard performance benchmark for DirectX 10 gaming PCs. It includes two graphics tests, two CPU tests and six feature tests. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark Vantage is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 10 under game-like loads. 3DMark Vantage saw very similar results when looking at the difference with the 5830 Xtreme, and was leaps and bounds in front of the 6670. Heaven 2.1 is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items. Heaven saw some interesting results as the 5770 Radeon's edged slightly forward but only by a minor amount. Batman: Arkham Asylum is an action-adventure stealth game that uses the Unreal Engine 3. It relies heavily on nVidia's PhsyX engine to give improved physics throughout if available. and uses lots of textures and polygons to build the character. 86 FPS on maximum settings in Batman is a fantastic result for anyone wanting to play this game on a budget. Dirt 3 was released in May 2011 and is the third in the Dirt series offering a complete overhaul in terms of graphics for the DirectX 11 platform which extreme lighting effects and reflections as well as showcasing fast moving graphics and using in game physics to bring the most extreme quality in terms of video rendering. They bundled Dirt 3 with this card and at 34.24 FPS it's not fantastic, but won't see any noticeable lag. Just Cause 2 is an open world action-adventure video game that was released at the beginning of 2010. The game uses the Avalanche Engine 2.0 and runs on DirectX 10. Several graphics effects and features are used to give a thorough workout to new and even older graphics cards. Very much the same with Just Cause 2, 32.95 FPS is nothing to write home about but it will see you get maximum settings on a budget. Mafia II is an older game and therefore it does have older graphics engines, however this is is still a good all-round in game benchmark that combines the terrain and explosion rendering of Crysis with the dust and dirt particle rendering test of Dirt 2. It also takes into account the changing light conditions albeit not in quite the same detail as the others, but none-the-less still proves a cards capabilities on slightly older games. Mafia II was also the same giving just over 30FPS which is (in our opinion) a playable resolution and gives scope for lowering the quality settings if more frames is what you crave. Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market. Metro is an extreme game, with extreme power needed to run, especially at maximum settings, yet the 6770 still managed to cope and with lower quality settings, it can be played at an achievable frame-rate. Noise is generally the bain of most consumers lives and in the hope of finding the quietest operation, we feel it's necessary to show you the audio level of components. We use the same components throughout this test and use a sound level meter to record the audio level of the system with a passive graphics card installed. Once we have the level recorded with the passive card, we continue to change the graphics card for the one that we are testing. Due to us having the audio level recorded before installation, it gives us a guide to work with and shows that anything over our initial level is an audio gain. The cooler is the main aspect of this card, and gave some fairly quiet results, yet nothing to write home about. To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the graphics card takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment. At idle, the power consumption on the 6770 is reasonable and at load is also where we expected it to be. Measuring temperatures is all about being consitent, therefore we keep a steady eye on monitoring the ambient room temperature to make sure that it stays the same. While this is constantly being monitored, we measure the idle temperature of the card using HWMonitor over a 15 minute period. Once this has been recorded, we set FurMark into motion for 15 minutes and record the results again. This is where the Vortex II cooler really comes into its own and with low temperatures of 37 at idle and 55 at load, it's definitely something to get excited about. Being the first PowerColor card that we've received, we were unsure as to what to expect, as with all new products that you see for a first time. It's not only the branding that we were unsure of, but the essence behind the card, which comes down to the cooler and the overall package when put together. The general design of the card is nothing short of being sexy and has some fantastic colouring that works perfectly with our testbed Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z motherboard and Corsair Vengeance red coloured memory and is somewhat unique with the styling around the cooler. Performance is typically what we expected for a budget to mid-range card and the slight overclocks allow for a little bit better performance when comparing against the older 5770 and 5830 Xtreme of which in the majority of tests, the 5830 Xtreme only nudged ahead ever so slightly which in our eyes means the card would have to pay off in other areas including price. Adding to the overall value, the Dirt 3 coupon is a nice bonus and will allow you to install the card and start racing straight out of the box, but you will have to tinker with the settings, as we can't expect maximum settings on this particular card. Price is certainly a key feature of this card, as in our eyes, it's a make or break situation but sadly PowerColor aren't that big of a brand in the UK and thus not a lot of retail action is seen, and we wasn't able to find it for sale anywhere on the net, but hopefully this will change in the near future. In the US however, the card is available for $129.99 from Newegg which is $20 more compared to their stock AX6770 which in our humble opinion is worth it when looking at the merits of the Vortex II cooler which allowed for lower temperatures and quieter operation and also remembering that for your money you get a much better looking cooler and a mix of four display connectors opposed to the standard three. The bottom line is that while this card is good, it's not perfect. It's still very old technology when you compare it to the likes of some Nvidia cards on the market for around the same price based around the fresher, younger Fermi architecture. If AMD is your thing, then the card won't let you down and will be perfect for light to medium gaming but don't expect anything amazing when bumping up the resolution or quality settings, as the frame-rate will be hindered. It will also be useful in a HTPC scenario as it uses little power and remains inaudible throughout operation but we are left feeling a bit glum when you look at a Radeon 6850 only being slightly more expensive, but getting so much more GPU power for your money.