As video cards have grown in complexity and power consumption, so has their size. What started with small cards compared of bare chips has grown in to the modern dual-slot megacard that we’ve seen today. And it doesn’t stop there.

Within the last year in particular, manufacturers have been toying with the concept of the triple-slot card. This has come both with cards that are informally intended to use a 3^rd slot such as the toasty GeForce GTX 480 (where NVIDIA highly recommends leaving the adjoining slot empty) to cards that formally take up a 3^rd slot to afford bigger heatsinks and fans. With more space for cooling gear, manufactures can push more powerful cards than before thanks to the extra cooling afforded by this gear.

We have a few different triple-slot 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 the triple-slot concept and attaches it to the normally cooler Raden HD 5770: PowerColor’s Radeon HD 5770 PCS+ Vortex .

The Vortex is a factory-overclocked 1GB Radeon HD 5770. Compared to the stock clocked 5770, PowerColor gives it a bit of a nudge by increasing the 5770’s core clock from 850MHz to 900Mhz and the memory clock from 1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) to 1.225Ghz (4.9GHz data rate), for a 5% core overclock and 2% memory overclock. This gives the card a small but measurable performance lead over its stock-clocked predecessors.

But by far the most interesting difference with this card is the cooler. By default, the Vortex uses a fairly standard fan-over-heatsink double-slot cooler. A 92mm fan sits on top of an aluminum heatsink with a copper baseplate, with a partial plastic shroud directing airflow out of the front and the rear of the card. The twist (and there’s literally a twist involved) is that the 92mm fan is adjustable – by twisting it, it can be raised roughly 9mm, in effect turning the cooler on the card in to a triple-slot cooler.

Specifically the fan sits inside a red plastic shim that can be twisted to make the shim and the enclosed fan protrude. With the shim lowered the fan sits virtually right on top of the heatsink, while when raised the shim brings the fan farther above the heatsink while pulling double-duty by keeping the airflow directly focused on the same spot on the heatsink. PowerColor’s rationale for this design is that raising the fan reduces backpressure caused by the heatsink, which should improve the cooling capabilities of the card.

Vortex Fan Lowered

Vortex Fan Raised
 

In the case of the Vortex, by using an adjustable-height fan the card can work as a double-slot card while being convertible for use in computers which can afford the 3^rd slot. This adds some complexity to the card – “my fan broke” can take on a whole new meaning – but it also allows PowerColor to toy with a triple-slot design without dedicating themselves to it and driving away buyers who can’t fit a triple-slot card. However this also means that they aren’t realizing the full benefits of a triple-slot design, as they can’t use an outright larger heatsink or fan in the card’s construction.

The big question of course is whether this convertible design has any real-world benefit, and the answer is kind-of, sort-of, not-really. We’ll get to a full breakdown of the cooler’s performance in our Power, Temperature & Noise section of the review, but we’ll say right now that adjusting the fan doesn’t have a significant impact on any of its attributes – it performs near-consistently with both the fan lowered and raised. Ultimately the card doesn’t stop acting like a dual-slot card.

Moving on, the card itself it notably smaller than the AMD reference design. PowerColor has managed to pack an overclocked Radeon HD 5770 in to a PCB the same length as the more concise Radeon HD 5750, with the card only extending 7.15” versus the reference 5770’s 8.25”.

As for the port configuration, the Vortex uses AMD’s standard 2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DP Eyefinity port configuration with a slight twist. The ports have been rearranged so that rather than the pair of DVI ports being at the bottom of the card, they’re at the center of the card with the HDMI port above and the DP port below. At first glance this seems counterproductive to cooling since it results in the DVI ports more directly blocking the card’s airflow, but as this is a card that vents from both the front and the back this is not a critical difference.

Rounding out the package is the usual collection of parts, adaptors and manuals: a DVI->VGA dongle, a short CrossFire bridge, a driver CD, and a generic multilingual quick installation guide. PowerColor is also including a separate 1 page manual for the Vortex, detailing how to raise/lower/remove the fan.

Finally, PowerColor is also including a free game with the card: Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2. MW2 still separately sells at its full MSRP, so if you don’t already have the game this will help take the sting out of the Vortex’s own above-average MSRP. Which on that note, the Vortex is currently selling for around $165, putting it around $20-$25 more expensive than the average 1GB 5770.

The Test & Performance

As the Vortex has a slight factory overclock compared to a stock-clocked 5770, we’ve run our usual gauntlet of benchmarks. We’ll forgo the running commentary, but with a 5% core overclock and 2% memory overclock, the card performs a few percent better than the stock-clocked 5770 on average.

Power, Temperature, & Noise

For our look at power, temperature, & noise, we’ve run the Vortex with the fan both retracted and extended. As we normally test cards with the fan speed on automatic we’ve gone ahead and continued this practice here, though we’ll note that the fan position had absolutely no effect on what speed the card ultimately chose to run the fan at, likely because of the nearly non-existent difference in temperature.

For our charts here, the Vortex's fan is in its lowered position unless otherwise noted.

At idle, power consumption is unchanged from our reference 5770. Under load the Vortex ends up drawing slightly more power, which is to be expected due to the card’s slight overclock. Under Crysis this amounts to 2W more power draw, while FurMark sees a much more noticeable rise of 13W. All things considered we’re surprised to see that the power draw of the Vortex differ from the 5770 by so little – usually a shorter card has to give up some power efficiency in order to make the shorter length possible, but this is not the case for the Vortex.

Moving on to temperatures, we have two different stories to look at. For idle temperatures the Vortex ends up being a mere 1C cooler than our reference 5770, an unsurprising outcome since idle temperatures vary little for any given GPU once you move to an appropriately large cooler.

Meanwhile the load temperatures are much more interesting – under Crysis our Vortex is an amazing 11C cooler than our reference 5770, while under FurMark the Vortex is 4C hotter. This is a much bigger discrepancy between Crysis and FurMark than what we see with our reference 5770, and after some digging the reason appears to be the fan profile in use. The Vortex has a more aggressive fan profile that results in it ramping up the fan sooner than the reference 5770 leading to the cooler Crysis temperatures, while under a very high load like Furmark the difference in how the two fans ramp up become much less pronounced. This is why the Vortex can be cooler under Crysis while running warmer under FurMark. Disregarding fan profiles, the Vortex cooler would appear to be ever so slightly less efficient than the reference cooler, which may be a benefit of the reference 5770’s embedded-fan design.

For our look at temperatures, the configuration of the Vortex’s fan had no impact on the temperature the card settled at. Retracted or extended resulted in the same temperatures, and indeed the same fan speed.

Last but not least we have noise. At idle our noise results are in-line with the reference 5770 and our other quieter cards, with all of those cards running in to the noise floor of testing environment. Under load we do find a difference between the Vortex and the reference 5770, however it’s only the slightest difference. The Vortex ends up being around 1dB(A) quieter than the reference 5770, which is something that we can measure but not something we could realistically perceive.

As for testing the Vortex’s fan, extending it had a slightly negative impact on the amount of noise generated under load. The card was at its quietest when the fan was retracted, generating 46.2dB(A) of noise, while extending it made the card 0.5dB(A) louder. It’s an academic difference at best, but one showcasing how the heatsink and the body of the card serve to muffle the noise from the fan by a slight degree.

Ultimately we have two things to take away from these results. The first is that when it comes to temperature and noise, the Vortex’s design simply doesn’t produce remarkably different results from the reference 5770. The Crysis results are very impressive, but this has more to do with the ramping profile of the card’s BIOS than it does the hardware. Under similar circumstances the Vortex’s cooler is slightly less efficient and slightly quieter than the reference cooler, which isn’t a bad tradeoff given the otherwise outstanding Crysis results.

The second thing we can take away is that the Vortex’s adjustable fan is little more than a gimmick. The only thing raising the fan accomplished is to make the card ever so slightly louder, but it didn’t do anything for cooling. We’ll grant PowerColor high scores here for effort, but it’s a very good thing for PowerColor that the adjustable fan doesn’t appear to have any negative impact on the card when it’s retracted, as this means the fan is merely an intellectual curiosity rather than a more serious design flaw.

All-told there is one good thing to come from the fan however: it’s easily removable. A removable fan makes it easier to clean the card without having to remove the heatsink or the shroud, the latter of which is held down by 4 very small screws.

Overclocking

While the Vortex is already factory overclocked, there’s some additional headroom on the card for further overclocking. Do note that the card does not use voltage-adjustable VRMs, so overclocking is limited to what can be achieved at stock voltage.

After overclocking our Vortex, we were able to increase the core clock to 970MHz and the memory clock to 1350Mhz(5.4GHz effective). This represents a 7.7% core overclock and a 10% memory overclock over the card’s factory settings, or a 14% core overclock and a 12.5% memory overclock over a the 5770’s reference clocks.

Note that all of these tests are with the Vortex's fan lowered.

Overclocking the Vortex offers a solid performance improvement, but it won’t be enough to leapfrog any other DX11 card in our tests.

Meanwhile the power/temperature/noise penalty for overclocking the card is very low due to the fact that we’re limited to overclocking without voltage adjustments. Temperatures rise 3C in both Crysis and FurMark, which translates in to roughly a 1dB(A) increase in noise. Meanwhile the power consumption increase leading to all of this is 5W-10W.

Final Words

When we first agreed to review PowerColor’s Radeon HD 5770 PCS+ Vortex, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. Whatever we were expecting though was that the card would be easy to evaluate in one manner or another. This didn’t turn out to be the case.

We’ll start with the Vortex’s adjustable fan, the card’s big feature. In short, the adjustable fan is a useless gimmick in our tests. Extending the fan doesn’t change the card’s temperatures and it only makes the card slightly louder. There’s no useful reason to extend the fan and hence there’s no reason to take advantage of the card’s adjustable fan. For all practical purposes, this card should be considered a double-slot 5770 with a fan that can be removed for an easy cleaning.

The 5770 is not a hot card in the first place, so the fact that an adjustable fan didn’t have a significant impact doesn’t really surprise us in the end. As we’ll see in some other triple-slot cards later this month and next month there’s definitely a point to a wider design, but it only manifests itself on larger, hotter cards that also go all the way with a triple-slot cooler rather than toying with the concept like PowerColor does here.

But while the adjustable fan is a gimmick, the overall cooler design for the Vortex is not. It’s generally as good as the reference 5770 which was already a solid design in the first place. Much more impressive is the fact that PowerColor managed to pull this off on a card over an inch shorter than the reference 5770 with no downsides to speak of. With a factory overclock it’s faster than, as cool as, and as overclockable as any reference 5770, all in a smaller package. Unlike the fan, this really is an impressive feat for the Vortex.

Finally we’re left with pricing. The 1GB 5770 market is fairly competitive, and as a semi-specialty card the 5770 Vortex is not competitively priced with the cheapest cards on the market. At $165 it’s not poorly priced but it’s also not a steal. If you need a shorter Radeon HD 5770, it’s one of only a few cards that will fit the bill, otherwise you have to look at the overclock and the included copy of Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2.

Cards with a similar overclock – including PowerColor’s previous PCS+ 5770 based on the same PCB – can be had for as little as $140 after rebate. Since we haven’t tested the previous PCS+ so we can’t say too much about it, but ultimately the Vortex is only price competitive if you value a copy of Modern Warfare 2. Otherwise as one of the more expensive 5770s on the market, it should be possible to find a similarly performing card for less.