Two weeks ago AMD officially unveiled the Radeon HD 7800 series. Composed of the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition and Radeon HD 7850, AMD broke from their earlier protocol with the 7700 and 7900 series and unveiled the cards ahead of their actual launch in order to beat CeBIT and GDC. The result was a pair of impressive – if expensive – cards that cemented AMD’s control of the high-end video card market. Unfortunately because of this early unveiling you couldn’t buy one at the time.

Those two weeks have now come and gone, and the 7800 series has finally been released for sale. Because AMD’s partners have largely passed on AMD’s reference design for the 7870 series we wanted to take a look at what the actual retail cards would be like; with almost everyone using a custom cooler and many partners using factory overclocks, there’s a great deal of variation between cards. To that end HIS and PowerColor have sent over their top 7870 cards, the HIS 7870 IceQ Turbo and the PowerColor PCS+ HD7870. How do these retail cards stack up compared to our reference 7870, and what kind of impact do their factory overclocks bring? Let’s find out.

With the recent rise in the number of triple-slot cards, we have a few different cards in-house that we’re going to be looking at over the next few weeks. But to kick things off, we decided to start small, looking at an interesting product from PowerColor that takes an interesting direction with the triple-slot concept.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 5770 PCS+ Vortex Edition is a factory overclocked Radeon HD 5770 with a unique feature: an adjustable height fan. By default the fan sits flush against the heatsink of this double-slot card, but with a twist of the fan it can be raised roughly 9mm. PowerColor says that doing can improve the cooling beyond what a pure double-slot card can achieve by reducing backflow, and today we set to find out if that's the case.