PowerColor's creative new cards at Computex
Having taken refuge in PowerColor's wonderfully temperature regulated room, we cast our eyes over some of the company's latest designs.
First up is a passively cooled Radeon HD 5750, carrying PowerColor's "Go! Green" branding. Engineered for environmental friendliness, the card features and additional PCB layer to the reference 5750 design for improved power distribution and a high-end Volterra VRM, making it 20% more efficient than standard implementations. This card is available now and comes at premium of around £15-20.
I'm happy to see some new passive cards, i've been looking for a great HTPC for a while but i doubt that this is it.
First of all there has been a Passive 5750 Club3D for over 6 months, the cooler looks exactly the same and it costs €130 while Powercolor's costs €160 (Whom by the way has been available since early march)
Theoretically the Powercolor GO! GREEN HD5670 would be a much better HTPC choice, but at €120 its cant compete with the actively cooled HD5670 for €70, HD5750 for €95 or HD5770 for €120. Adding €50 on €70 or €95 card to swap the cooler is plain and simply silly.
Sapphire (which also makes the €70 HD5670) has also announced a passive 5670, hopefully they will manage to keep the price at a sensible level (but i doubt it since they stupidly decided to put 1gb GDDR5 on it), otherwise i'll just wait for nVidia to release their new GF108 entry level/HTPC cards.
For the frag freaks, PowerColor has collaborated with NIC manufacturer Bigfoot Networks to deliver a 2-in-1 card that carries both an HD 5770 and a Killer2100. Dubbed the Radeon HD 5770 sniper, the NIC is attached to the PCIe terminus via a bridge chip. Both graphics card and NIC present themselves as separate devices so device drivers won't prove a problem. For those that think they'll get some benefit out of a hardware-offload NIC, the card, coming out in July is expected to provide around a £35 saving over buying a GPU and Killer2100 separately.
PowerColor sniper
[IMG="http://img.hexus.net/v2/internationalevents/computex2010/powercolor/sniper.jpg"]http://img.hexus.net/v2/internationalevents/computex2010/powercolor/sniper.jpg[/IMG]
Maybe for "Frag Freaks" but i don't swing that way so this is pretty much a waste of money IMHO.
Catering to the media centre crowd, PowerColor is offering up the world's first low profile HD 5770 with GDDR5. The core/mem clocks have been set at 875/1225MHz making it a competitive card for the low-profile market.
Till now the GTS250 was the only real choice for anyone wanting to make a mITX pc with gaming capability, finally the mITX crowd can get some DX11 gaming!
Our penultimate card is the Radeon HD 5770 Evolution, which sports a Lucid Hydra chip enabling flexible multi-GPU support no matter the chip maker. It's offered up on a reasonably sized PCB with core and mem clocks of 850MHz and 1200MHz respectively. At present we couldn't coax a price or shipping date our of PowerColor, but we'll let you know as soon as we do.
While the idea sounds brilliant i'm afraid that Lucid's Hydra is pretty doomed unless nVidia stops blocking many features as soon as a ATI card is detected.
Maybe Lucid and nVidia can work out some exclusive deal to let them re-enable these features on their (by Lucid already modified) drivers, seems win-win to me.
And finally, for the watercooling crowd, we have the FC5870 V2. The V2 features an improved board layout and updated waterblock (old and new cards shown top and bottom respectively in the below picture) to make it easier to work with. It comes clocked at 950MHz core with a factory set overvoltage, and should go past 1GHz with no problems, we're told. Expect a £70-80 premium on this card.
PowerColor FC5870V2
The only snag to this heavy mutha is that... well... it's a heavy mutha, but PowerColor's thought of that and is making available an adjustable plastic pillar that can help stop the card bending itself into oblivion. We hear it will eventually be bundled with new cards, but presently it's available separately for a few quid. We're perturbed by a card that needs such structural support, but we're sure some will find it distinctly manly.
PowerColor Pillar
I've always had an irrational phobia of watercooling!
As for the pillar, not a bad idea, but if cards are getting so big and hot they need cooling so massive that it compromises their structural integrity they should be looking at redesigning motherboards and GPU slots to suit the needs of next gen cards instead of this strap-on solution.
To the folks at Galaxy! Not only they defied all expectation and made a Dual GF100 based card, but they also made it as a Single-PCB & Dual Slot card! Lets just hope it wont be really expensive like the ASUS ARES or for water cooled systems only.
