AMD 7000 Graphics Cards series is known for its performance and reliability and we all respect that. Today we take a look at AMD HD 7870 Graphics Card.When it comes to the divide between red and green, there are a few points of interest. As well as the 7870's marginal core clock lead, the card utilises 32 Render Output Units (ROPs) and a 256-bit memory bus, as opposed to the 24 ROPs and cut-down 192-bit bus seen on the GTX 660 Ti.Conversely, NVIDIA's card takes charge with 1344 stream processors and its whopping 6008MHz memory clock. In theory, this allows for superior multi-tasking with shader effects, and a higher fill-rate than is possible with the 7870's offering of 1280 stream processors and 4800MHz memory. It's a mixed bag, but they do each find a common ground in their use of 2GB of GDDR5 RAM.Next, we look at the physical aspects of the card . This edition of the 7870 counts in at 268mm in length - just one millimetre longer than MSI's 660 Ti Power Edition. On top, we see three intertwined copper pipes bending out from different sections of its aluminum fin array. A lion's share of the ventilation to this heatsink is handled by the twin CoolStream fans at the front, though the open-shell design also permits air to circulate from around the PC to the top and bottom of the card. In practice, this doesn't amount to any more noise than the HD 7850, and avoids the rising sound signature of the previous generation's 6870.We see plenty of connectivity options when we turn it to the end, starting with two Mini DisplayPorts, a HDMI v1.4a port, and two dual-link DVI-I connections. To bolster this, we're surprised to also find a generous a range of converter cables bundled in too,which would otherwise cost us a pretty penny. With these we can convert either of these smaller DisplayPort connections to more popular standards like DVI or HDMI, plus there's one to bridge the gap between DVI and HDMI.Talking power, the card requires two 6-pin PCIe connectors to run. The 7870's reference model is rated at 175W TDP (thermal design power), but rival cards with an equivalent overclock tend to lurk at the 190W end, putting this version on par with the GTX 660 Ti's rated throughput.Apart from 1280 stream processors, Pitcairn has 80 Texture Memory Units (TMUs), 32 ROPs (Raster Operations), and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory. Here's something interesting. AMD deemed 2 GB as the new standard memory amount for performance-segment graphics cards. Both the HD 7870 and HD 7850 have 2 GB of memory, clocked at 1200 MHz (4.80 GHz GDDR5 effective), churning out 153.6 GB/s memory bandwidth. As for the core clock, the HD 7870 has its core clocked at 1000 MHz, making it AMD's second "GHz Edition" SKU after the HD 7770; while the HD 7850 has its core clocked at 860 MHz. The Radeon HD 7850 is carved out by disabling four GCN CUs, leaving 1024 stream processors, and 64 TMUs. The rest of the SKU is identical to the HD 7870.Nevertheless, due to the ZeroCore technology leveraged into the architecture of 7xxx series, idling on the desktop automatically scales this figure down to just 15W when possible, achieved by reducing the clock speed to 275MHz, and changing the state of its DRAM chips.Altogether the 7800 series isn’t just the successor to the Barts based 6800 series in name but also the successor to the 6800 in design. This includes not only power consumption, with one card being a sub-150W part, but also with regards to things such as CrossFire, where it features a single CF connector. Interestingly enough even though Barts was already a fairly small chip for its performance, Pitcairn takes this one step further with a die size of 212mm2, which in turn contains 2.8B transistors, only 160M more than Cayman. As we’ll see when we get to our benchmarks, this makes Pitcairn a surprisingly small chip given its 6970+ performance.Speaking of the 6970, let’s talk about the 7800 series’ competition. As AMD began winding down Cayman (6900 series) almost immediately with the launch of the 7900 series, at this point the 6900 market has effectively dried up. Having taken themselves out of competition with themselves, AMD’s only competition is NVIDIA’s lineup. From a performance and price basis the 7870 and 7850 don’t map particularly well to any specific NVIDIA products, but generally speaking they’re targeted against the GTX 570 and GTX 560 Ti respectively.
Now just take a look @ BenchMarks Results.........
- Nice Design.
- Good Overclocking.
- 4K video and other forward-looking features.
- Nice Performance.
- low Nose Produced.
- Native full-size HDMI & DisplayPort output.
- Consumes a bit more Power.
- CCC Overdrive limits too low
