7870 ghz to 7870 myst worth it?

with all these deals of the myst i was wondering if it was worth upgrading the 7870 ghz to 7870 myst and to sell the games and the ghz to offset the cost?

you have a 7870Ghe?

It is a decent bump yes, but if you already have the 7870Ghe and you will incur X cost for upgrading, then why bother, well unless there are games you play or plan to play in crazy resolution/details then it might be a good idea, I suppose its up to you to decide that, quite a few reviews out there showing the differences, boil down to 7950 performance at 7870 pricing

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013...n_hd_7870_myst_edition_review/11#.UVG8emfD_IE

I would go for the sapphire 7870 XT though(same thing as this one, but sapphire instead, and by far better cooling) there is the EZ edition of the Myst as well(slightly better cooler)
Then of course there is 7950 Msi twin frozr or Sapphire 7950 boost dual X for a slight increase in cost their performance is also higher(more shaders etc)

My $ would go with Sapphire XT or a 7950 for the extra cost there is a noticeable bump in performance, not to mention overclocking headroom/performance gain.

Are you overclocking your 7870? If so you are likely not going to notice a big difference unless you go to an actual 7950 or 70. If not you should really think about doing so. I've got a 7870 at 1225/1350 and in several games it benches within spitting distance of a stock 7950. OC'ing is a crapshoot but you'd have to get that 7870XT up there for it to really pull away from a 7870 noticeably. I would imagine a 7870XT/7950 would be kinder to higher resolution/multimonitor gaming than a vanilla 7870 so that should be factored in as well but I say nothing less than a 7950 if you want to upgrade.

7870 to 7870XT is a waste!!!

Sell the 7870 and buy 7950, OC the crap out of it, and enjoy....

it is not a waste directly, there is 1536 shaders vs 1792 on the 7950 and 1280 shaders on the 7870 (most of which are underpowered on a lot of games anyways, but do show a distinct advantage when mining as an example)

basically you lose only about ~5% raw performance from a 7950 to the 7870XT you lose 16 texture units, same amount of rops and the mentioned shader difference and a slightly less wide memory bus which is not used much when at lower resolutions anyways, most of this is gained back via overclocking(which they do very well)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_7000_Series
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/392660-33-7870xt-7950-660ti a little bit of reading here that is worthwhile if you want to do so.
just look at the raw numbers to put it into greater perspective.

I will say it simply, IF you can cover the price difference and only pay say $30 more for the "trade" difference, its worth it, IF you are paying near the full price, don't bother. Depending on the game you play, resolutions, settings, multi-monitor etc there is a noticeable difference between a 7950 and a 7870(more shaders and such) think of this XT as a less clocked 7950 saving a few $. It has been like this before an example 6850 vs 6870, 6850 could on average clock a bit higher then 6870 and they ended up being very near the same performance level except in games that used shaders heavily.

7870XT clocks up on average a bit higher so the difference is moot between the 7950 and 7870XT, the main difference is like I stated multi-monitor high res with high settings then the 7950 simply has more grunt available to it, BUT this only matters if you are using what it has available to it, for most of us 7870 at 1080p is more then powerfull enough the only benefit the 7870XT will gain is slight improvement in raw frames or some games with slightly higher quality settings(example if using a 120Hz monitor and wanting to use higher levels of Anti aliasing which tends to be more shader heavy in most games)

There is a tool for every job, depends on your pocketbook, 7870XT replaced the standard 7870 as more value for the $ spent, in essence it is a less costly 7950 just as the new 650Ti boost is a less costly 660. Cut and dry, 7870 great performance for 1080p, 7870XT maximized performance for 1080p, 7950 above 1080p i.e multi-monitor. There is a reason AMD did not launch the XT right away, its performance is far to close to the 7950.

i guess i should just try overclocking this sapphire 7870ghz than upgrading.

Right now is a good time to buy with the deals and games so I don't see why not. It is a better card but really not much of a big upgrade but still an upgrade.

yes you should sapphire dual fan are excellent overclockers on average one of the better ones.

My msi 7870 can only do around 1190core 1405memory at 1.268v stable any less voltage and it will not stabilize but I can bitcoin mine at 1221core with only 1.255v getting 450Mh/s

Again, in a lot of games it is still a fair gain, like going from a 7850 to a 7870 really(not quite as large, but you get the point)

There's about a 4.5% improvement in Passmark scores. Likely anything you're dissatisfied with playing on the 7870 you're still going to be dissatisfied with on the 7870XT. If you want 80% faster performance buy another 7870GHz, or sell it and get a 7950, which will net you ~20%.

Fooshnik said:

There's about a 4.5% improvement in Passmark scores. Likely anything you're dissatisfied with playing on the 7870 you're still going to be dissatisfied with on the 7870XT. If you want 80% faster performance buy another 7870GHz, or sell it and get a 7950, which will net you ~20%.

Click to expand...

Most people are able to over clock TAHITI based HD7870 to attain similar HD7950 performance.


Not all HD7950s over clock well and from what I am seeing it seems like most of the newer HD79XX cards are not very high quality for over clocking because of terrible low ASIC scores.

For $208 for the Myst on sale right now at newegg with the games the card is worth the money. Great bang per buck.

My only grip about the TAhiti 7870 LE is that it is so long. The PCB looks bare and cheap in comparison to HD79XX cards.

Tahiti 7870 LE with a PCB the size of a HD7850 would be the bomb.

I type to much, I know this with time they learn what are the better dies and bin them accordingly so they can get the best chips on the best cards.

Main reason why the best 7870s and the 7870XT can overclock so well is generally a better binning, as I had mentioned, this can be seen with cards of previous generations and still is today, generally by them trimming back X shaders and such(but leaving the power delivery intact) it usually allows more overclocking headroom, I brought up the 6850/6870 as good proof of this. The initial 7950s overclocked like crazy, the "modern" ones for the most part do not, they keep the best dies for the best versions of them that they can markup or use them for the 7970.

On average, the best clocking 7900 series chips will be used for 7970 OR 7870XT as with one they need as much oomph as they can get, the 7870XT has to deliver very close to 7950 performance to meet its specs and still have headroom, the lower voltage chips(better quality) and such will be used on the dual gpu cards, unfortunately the 7950 has to be "trimmed" back some in the overclocking department compared to when it first launched otherwise it simply gets way to close to 7970 performance.

Simple, 7870-7870XT-7950-7950 boost-7970-7970GHe all have their place and are very well binned if you look overall at all the models available, very similar to CPU an example a Phenom 955 on average will clock up a bit higher then a 965 it is a slightly better binned chip usually slightly less leakage for its clock speed, GPU are similar in this, if it fails to run X compute units at X speed X power usage they can and do cut parts on it and sell off as a lower end card.

Most the information I can grab, stock vs stock 7870GHe vs 7870XT vs 7950 there is a 15% difference and 5% difference respectively, the mining performance of the XT makes it very worth the price increase, the gaming performance is very justifiable and there are a couple games I have that my 7870 overclocked is not quite enough oomph to run comfortable at 8x AA but can do 4x just fine 7950 can easily do 8x so this XT card within reason does have like 300 shaders more among other things so yes, it very much can make a difference, think like the difference of a 650 and 650ti while the numbers seem small the realworld performance difference is very much worthwhile.

Passmark scores LOL, don`t believe in canned benchmarks they can easily be twisted in a good or bad way distorting the numbers to make something like excellent(when it isn`t) or not that good when realworld shows a much greater and provable difference.

Is the 7950 worth the cost increase? yes if you have the $ 7870XT is ~5% different so they same can be said and it is not that much more then the 7870 is.

OP the HD 7870 to HD 7870 Tahiti LE is not worth the effort of selling. go for a HD 7950 boost. preferably sapphire , his or msi as they have unlocked voltage.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/HD_7950_X2_Boost/31.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Club_3D/HD_7870_jokerCard_Tahiti_LE/31.html

BF3 1920 x 1200

HIS HD 7950 boost(1210 mhz) - 82.9
HD 7870 Tahiti LE(1210 mhz) - 69.8
HIS HD 7950 boost - 67.5
HD 7870 Tahiti LE - 59.2
HD 7870 - 53.8

here is a 3d mark 2013 firestrike comparison of HD 7870 Tahiti LE and HD 7950 at 1 Ghz
HD 7870 tahiti le graphics score - 6000. HD 7950 - 7000

http://www.overclock.net/t/1345122/sapphire-hd-7870-xt-based-on-amd-tahiti-le-chip/70#post_19294019

on average overclocks of 1150 mhz on HD 7950 even a 1300 mhz HD 7870 Tahiti LE can't catch up. get the sapphire HD 7950 boost for USD 310 (290 after mail in rebate)

http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=AT-7950BST

raghu78 said:

on average overclocks of 1150 mhz on HD 7950 even a 1300 mhz HD 7870 Tahiti LE can't catch up.

Click to expand...

With LE you can pocket some money to save to catch up when the HD8000 cards come out.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Club_3D/HD_7870_jokerCard_Tahiti_LE/

this shows overall how close they are in a very high number of games, they are using the joker card though(same diff just different cooler more or less)

"In our testing, we see very decent performance results from the Tahiti LE. Performance-wise, it is just 2% slower than the HD 7950, but 8% faster than the HD 7870, which means that the HD 7870 jokerCard is much closer to the HD 7950. This is also true for most of the PCB design, which is based on high-quality components; it is not an ultra-low-cost version of the HD 7950 PCB. While we have no baseline values for a comparison, overclocking this 1536-shader card worked better than expected. A maximum GPU clock of 1210 MHz is HD 7970 / GHz territory. Memory overclocked well too, with 1620 MHz, but seems to be held back a bit by the Elpida chips that do not overclock as well as their counterparts from Samsung or Hynix. Kudos to Club 3D for using faster 6 GHz chips instead of cheaper and slower 5 GHz ones.

If you are in the market for a HD 7950, then the Tahiti-based HD 7870 is a great choice that is significantly cheaper ($270 vs. $310) but only a tiny bit slower (2%). I actually think that its price difference is one of the main reasons for the lack of more Tahiti LE cards. Board manufacturers are worried that such a new product might have a negative impact on the sales of their existing HD 7950 inventory. These cards are already priced quite competitively, but the extra 1 GB of memory does add to the price without doing much for the performance of the card." -the exception to this is for very high AA/multi-monitor eyefinity stuff where the extra memory does have a noticeable benefit not nearly as much as one would believe though, if you are running mods through the nose in skyrim as an example well that's your choice

up to the user, if you feel the 7870 is maybe a tad slower then you like, this is a bump and 7950 is only a small hair better overall in most games. all depends on your resolution, your needs, and as OP had originally asked, if he traded his 7870 for a 7870XT would it be worth it, yes, but only he can decide this based on ample enough reviews and info posted.

I only game at 1980x1200. The only game that had a little slowdown for me was tomb raider, but still it wasn't by much. I just saw the price point for the 7870xt was so appealing i was trying to see if it was worth the cost of buying again and reselling. I haven't oc'd my videocards in a long long time so my ocing knowledge on video cards is limited compared to Oc'ing my 2500k.

sapphire TRIX is the easiest way for me, you can have up to 4 profiles can adjust core clock, memory clock, VDDC(core voltage) and board power limit(base + or - 20% to limit well total board power)

it really is a nice, easy to use program. Generally speaking you use something like heaven benchmark to find stable points for core and memory, the try your favorite game with these clocks, examples would be BF3(very sensitive to overall clocks) or Diablo 3 very sensitive to memory clocks. Generally speaking if you push to hard you will get crashing-bsod which is usually core related, whereas crash/lockup with corruption is memory related, also in regards to memory, if pushing to hard you will notice that your frames actually go down some as the memory on newer cards(7870 does) error correct so it tends to lose performance when it starts "failing" in which case back the memory speed down some.

Easy as pie, just keep an eye on temps(I force the fan to X speed as its easier on the ears, the fan, and dust buildup) for a mid clock ~1175 core 1360 memory I use 50% for max clock 1221 core for mining 65% with my MSI Twin Frozr III 7870. As all cards are different it may take some trial and error to find the sweet spots for the speeds as well as voltages, not hard, just takes patience and usually a lot of reboots

https://www.sapphireselectclub.com/ssc/TriXX/
http://unigine.com/products/heaven/

you could use 3dmark of furmark but both are almost pointless and in furmarks case not realistic and/or dangerous loading type, not to mention usually mitigates throttling among other things.

my new msi 7870 is able to up core clock to 1265 1.225v able to mine at 1342 1.262v one beast of an overclocker, and go figure I got it at future shop, looked like it was put back into package, most of the plastic protective caps and such were not were they should be and cooler was a bit scratched, changed the paste on it after a good cleaning, temps max out 65% fan with 2 cards in my raven 3 1342 core gets me 72c on a 15c with sun beating into window, we shall see how it holds up in the summer temps.

So what did you decide to do OP?

The myst card sounds like a vacuum cleaner. I wouldn't advise it. Try the 7870xt or Go for 7950.