Powercolor 4870 with PCS cooler - To buy or not to buy

M

mrcorbo

Foo Fighter
Veteran
NewEgg has the 512MB 4870 OC to 800Mhz with custom "PCS" cooler from Powercolor in stock for $289. Does anyone have any experience with this cooler on other products? How are noise levels under load? Any thoughts on the Powercolor brand?

I'm just about literally hovering over the purchase button waiting for someone to "talk me off the ledge". If there isn't any strong negative opinion on any of the above, I'm going to make the purchase. This 4870 fills my needs just about perfectly if none of the above present any issues.

Thanks for any feedback.

EDIT: No objections, so I bought it.
 
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LOL, looks like you have almost as itchy of a trigger finger as I do when it comes to buying PC hardware. Usually when I ask for owner feedback on a specific component I'm ready to buy right then, and generally do within an hour or two. :p

Don't worry, you made the right decision. No doubt you'll be extremely happy with that card.
 
mrcorbo said:
NewEgg has the 512MB 4870 OC to 800Mhz with custom "PCS" cooler from Powercolor in stock for $289. Does anyone have any experience with this cooler on other products? How are noise levels under load? Any thoughts on the Powercolor brand?

I'm just about literally hovering over the purchase button waiting for someone to "talk me off the ledge". If there isn't any strong negative opinion on any of the above, I'm going to make the purchase. This 4870 fills my needs just about perfectly if none of the above present any issues.

Thanks for any feedback.

EDIT: No objections, so I bought it.
Click to expand...

You might wanna check this,
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1207678&postcount=488
 
Hasn't been a smooth ride with this one.

First problem:

I am currently running on an aging Asus A8N SLI Deluxe (S939) MB. For literally years I have been running a dual-core Opteron 165 o/c to ~2.5 GHz on a 270MHz FSB. I did recently upgrade to an 880 Watt HiPro power supply. With this card installed I experience complete system instability when there is any overclock set in the BIOS, even just 10Mhz on the FSB.

Oddly, though, if I use the Nvidia Performance control panel in Windows to raise the FSB post-boot to it's maximum setting of 250MHz I experience no issues.

Took me about 1.5 nights of work to figure all that out. Swapping back to my 8800GT allowed me to apply my 270MHz FSB in BIOS again with no issues.

2nd Problem:

Fan ramps up and down in speed constantly making this "zip,zip" noise. Very annoying. Especially compared to my 8800GT which, because of it's custom cooler, was effectively silent.

3rd Problem: (not specific to this card, though)

Connecting this card to my receiver (Denon 3808ci) results in the receiver being recognized as a DVI device instead of HDMI. So, no audio support. I'm currently updating the firmware on my receiver to see if that will resolve this.

**Update**

A combination of the firmware update on the receiver and switching the input the PC was connected to to HDMI4 from HDMI1 resolved this issue. 5.1 channel LPCM, finally! I'm pretty happy about this, though all the hoops I had to jump through to get it was ridiculous.

Clearly this wasn't all I was hoping for. It isn't a complete disaster, and despite the 20 MHz lower FSB I still see nice performance gains in 3D apps. 2 of the 3 problems probably aren't even specific to this card. That having been said, for those looking for a 4870 with a custom cooling solution, you might want to wait to see what Asus, Force3D, Diamond, etc. have to offer instead of buying this one. And with the prices on reference cards you may even be better off buying one of those and fitting your own cooler.
 
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