Are PowerColor Video cards any good?

So I'm having problems with my HIS HD Radeon 5770s... They seem to be overheating a lot. Even at max fan settings they rarely set at 50c idle. I sent a help ticket towards the HIS support I told them my situation and explained that a red light comes kicks on the video card when my games crash to an non-responsive screen - in which I have to manually reboot to solve.

They said my cards are probably overheating. So I cleaned them down thoroughly, and I mean thoroughly. Took over the cooler, removed the fans used compressed air to blow away all the dust, used microfiber cloth and q-tips to wipe away dust off around the card and in hard to reach areas.

Used 99% Isopropyl alcohol and completely removed the old factory thermal paste on the cores and reapplied my own after I let the alcohol dry completely under a desk lamp with a 40w light bulb.

After all this I still get non-responsive crashes with the red light. Decent cable management, and good airflow are also in place. 1 120mm fan directly above the video cards blowing in cool air, 120m fan at the lower front of the case, blowing in air towards my hard drives and my Video cards. 1 120m rear exhaust, and 2 top 120m exhausts. (I even turned the clock settings back to the defaults and the card still is up in the 50cs, idle with 100% fan speed.)

These are my current cards. I honestly just believe they have very bad cooling design.

HIS HD 5770 Fan 1GB (128bit) GDDR5 PCIe (DirectX 11/ Eyefinity) < HD 5700 Series < Desktop Graphics < Products | HIS Graphic Cards

Anyway.. I plan on only spending a little more money on this machine because I want to save for a few years to rebuild another computer.

This the card I'm looking at.

Newegg.com - PowerColor AX6870 1GBD5-2DH Radeon HD 6870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card with Eyefinity

I just need to know if PowerColor has decent cooling systems on their cards.. Far as I can tell by the looks this one looks decent, and a lot better than my old cards.

I'm looking to spend less than 200. Also like to note that my case only seats a card up to like 9.6 inches long so anything else really high end won't fit. This particular card is 9.5 inches, so tight fit.

Hi Matt ,I was looking up card demensions and it is 9.84 shy of 10 in

Anyway i don't know about the power color version but i do knowi have 2 diamond model HD cards one being 5770 and the other 6870 runs great no heat or cooling issues

Solarstarshines said:

Hi Matt ,I was looking up card demensions and it is 9.84 shy of 10 in

Anyway i don't know about the power color version but i do knowi have 2 diamond model HD cards one being 5770 and the other 6870 runs great no heat or cooling issues

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Are you sure? The dimensions of that card is 241.3mm and 25.4mm = 1 inch. I got 9.5 inches.

Anyway I'll check out Diamond cards.

My previous gpu was a Powercolor HD5850, it was an excellent card and ran extremely cool.

I was very happy with it, owned it for 18 months before selling it due to an upgrade. The new owner emailed me to tell me he was very happy with it too.

So my personal experience of Powercolor has been a good one.

Certainly worth doing a quick search for reviews on google for the cards you are looking at as alot of them give benchmarks and temps.

Hope this helps a little

Paul.

paulpicks21 said:

My previous gpu was a Powercolor HD5850, it was an excellent card and ran extremely cool.

I was very happy with it, owned it for 18 months before selling it due to an upgrade. The new owner emailed me to tell me he was very happy with it too.

So my personal experience of Powercolor has been a good one.

Certainly worth doing a quick search for reviews on google for the cards you are looking at as alot of them give benchmarks and temps.

Hope this helps a little

Paul.

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Thanks Paul. Yeah I'm browsing the web, my case can only house 9.6 inches in length so my choices on higher-end cards are limited.

So far the Powercolor 6870 is my top choice.

I've purchased two PowerColor cards and haven't had any issues with them. Both are low end cards, but neither has had any heat related issues.

jeffro75 said:

I've purchased two PowerColor cards and haven't had any issues with them. Both are low end cards, but neither has had nay heat related issues.

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Hey thanks for the info. So far based on feedback, size and price of the PC HD 6870 it's likely I will go with that.

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.

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.

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.

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Have never owned a PowerColor but have owned several Sapphire cards and not yet has one let me down,currently have a Sapphire HD6870!!!

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.

Click to expand...

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.

Click to expand...

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.

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.

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.

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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.

Matt2488 said:

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.

Click to expand...

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.

Click to expand...

If they are Massed produced most likly the calibration for the machinary is off and it doesn't put the paste directly to the middle or just shoot to much on it

Just speculating though