Introduction

Every once in a while we need to make a choice, some are hard and some we know are right from the very beginning. Lately the hard 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.

To make it simple, we’ll take two similar DirectX 11 video cards which are both Radeon HD 5670 Series, one will have 512MB of memory and the other 1GB of memory. The 512MB video card will be the PowerColor HD 5670 PCS+ and the 1GB video card will be the Sapphire HD 5670. The PowerColor PCS+ has a clock speed of 785MHZ while the Sapphire 5670 has a 775MHZ clock speed. Both are the same series but relatively two different cards.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 5670 PCS+ is a budget mainstream gaming video card. The PowerColor HD 5670 PCS+ comes with factory overclock speed of 10MHz higher than a stock HD5670. The PCS+ HD5670 also includes a heatsink/fan combination with a 92mm low noise impeller that produces only 30 dB at load.