Lately the hardest choice when building a mainstream computer is video, there are a ton of mainstream video cards and while many are the same with different brand labels the average consumer may find it hard to decide which is which. The next phase would be to decide if you want an ATI based or NVIDIA based video card. DirectX 10 or DirectX 11 is another choice as well as how much memory 512MB or 1GB. The PowerColor Radeon HD 5670 PCS+ is a budget mainstream gaming video card and comes with a factory overclocked speed of 10MHz higher than a stock HD5670.
Provided By: PowerColor
Price:
Closer Look:
The PowerColor Radeon HD5670 PCS+ graphics card comes in a Black and Blue box with a Racing car image in the center of it. The back contains the many features of the graphics card, with power and system requirements on the side. Inside the exterior packaging is a brown protective box which contains the video card and its accessories.
The PowerColor 5670 PCI+ comes with a supplied DVI to VGA dongle. Also included are a specifications sheet and the driver installation disk.
Once out of the bag you can see that the PowerColor 5670 PCS+ has a black fan with the PowerColor Logo on it. The Heatsink/fan combination contains a 92mm low noise fan. It is PCI-e 2.1 compatible and it has one DVI, HDMI and Display Port output.
Testing:
My System:
CPU: AMD Phenom 8450@ 2.1 GHz
CPU Cooler: EverCool Buffalo CPU Cooler
Motherboard: ASUS M2N-MX SE PLUS
Memory: G.SKILL 4GB 1066 MHz
VGA: PowerColor Radeon HD 5670 PCS+ Video Card
Case: CoolerMaster HAF 922
My testing suite runs the gamut of synthetics and gaming engines that will help provide a more complete picture of a graphics card’s capabilities. The testing included the following software:
- Team Fortress 2
- FurMark
- Torchlight
- GPU-Z
Gaming tests were run at 1024X768, which reflects the resolution of my test setup’s monitor.

The Power Color 5670PCS+ has a strong showing, posting respectable frame rates with an average frame rate of 65 frames per second.

Torchlight gets an average frame rate of 66 frames per second.

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OverClocking:
As always, mileage will vary when overclocking, so monitor temperatures and be sure to always test for stability after each incremental change. I recommend FurMark for stability test as it’s the most taxing application you’ll find out there, drawing even more power and causing higher temperatures than your favourite game or 3DMark benchmark.
With that out of the way, I start overclocking the core and memory clocks in MSI Afterburner. The PowerColor PCS+ 5670 does indeed have some gas left in the tank, I was able to achieve a final stable overclock of 845MHz Core and 1065MHz Memory.

Conclusion:
The PowerColor PCS+ 5670 is a very good budget gaming card, lower on the performance ladder than the 5750, and clearly geared to consumers who occasionally do some light gaming. It is a small, quiet, low-power card that is a great upgrade option for people with an older system that want to easily improve their graphics performance.
PowerColor has also silghtly bumped up the clock speeds on the PCS+ 5670, giving a 1-2% performance increase over the reference card, nothing spectacular but measurable. More interesting, however, is PowerColor’s decision to use Samsung memory chips instead of Hynix, resulting in some good overclocking headroom.
The PowerColor PCS+ 5670 512MB is a great video card with a minor bump in clock speed, some good overclocking headroom available, and running cool and quiet, this card is a very good budget gaming card for consumers who do only moderate gaming and may be looking for a good value upgrade in their performance.