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 .

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