Are PowerColor Video cards any good?

Britton30 said:

first let me say I know nothing about the Powercolor brand. About over heating you might look into adding some water blocks to your GFX cards, you seem to be stressing them quite a bit. You might look to see if your PSU is putting out what it is supposed to.

I actually restored the factory defaults. Even after cleaning and reapplying fresh thermal grease they still run a little warm.

My PSU is putting out power fine, it's more then enough power for my system. (Thermaltake Toughtpower Grand 1200w A+ Certified Gold. This PSU is fairly new too, only few months)

The design on my card is just bad... I've been doing research and looked through old Newegg topics and apparently a lot of people have been having overheating issues with this particular card.

essenbe said:

In the FWIW catagory, I have used Powercolor before and have a Powercolor 5770 in my machine now. I have never had a single problem with them but am looking to upgrade. I was looking at the same card as you. The specs look good to me, but I have searched for hours and can't find but 8-10 reviews on the card. All of the reviews seem to be good, just not enough of them. So far what I have learned is that the 2DH version is quieter and cooler than the M2DH version. The M2DH has good reviews but is quite loud. Most of the reviews on the net are of the M2DH version. Not much to be found on the 2DH. That's the only thing that concerns me. So, I'm between that one and the Sapphire 6870 Vapor-X, which has a lot of reviews - all good.

Yeah.. That card is also shorter than the PowerColor 6870 by a few millimeters (Edit, actually 2 inches.). Might look into that.

Would it be a good idea to go ahead and remove the stock grease and reapply my own? Stock Grease is always put on sloppy anyway, 90% of the time it's oozing out the side of the cooler block.

essenbe said:

I'm far from an expert on GPU's, but it seems every HIS card I have looked up runs hot. I was looking at the HIS 6870, and that was the major complaint.

Probably because they don't know how to put on thermal grease. There was more grease oozing out the sides of the gpu than grease on the core itself.