Last month, AMD, which pioneered DirectX 11 compliant PC consumer graphics, released its second-generation Radeon HD 6800 DirectX 11 architecture, codenamed Northern Islands. The company has enjoyed a 6 month head-start into the race for DirectX 11 graphics hardware market dominance, which also reflected in both growth of market-share, and domination in sales. The time passed by also allowed AMD to refine and fine-tune its architecture to better suit the existing 40 nm silicon fabrication process, by promising to churn out higher performance per Watt and performance per mm² of die-area (plays an important role in product pricing), compared to the previous-generation Evergreen architecture. PowerColor's HD 6870 PCS+ is a custom HD 6870 design. It uses a different component selection on a very-close-to-reference PCB and changes the thermal solution compared to the AMD reference version. The most important points for the HD 6870 PCS+ are a clock speed of 940 MHz core and 1100 MHz memory, which is around 4.5% more on both core and memory.