AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB

The gang at Vortez have posted their review of the AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB today. For comparison purposes, you can see our evaluation here.

The HD7870 comes with 2GB of GDDR5 which is more than enough for the today's latest games and has AMD's latest GCN enabled architecture codenamed 'Pitcairn XT'. We will go into the details of this new core on the next page but as you would expect it is slightly less powerful than the Tahiti XT while having much more grunt than the 77XX Cape Verde. Don't be fooled into thinking the HD7870 is a go between card though as going by the specifications, it is not far behind the HD7950 GPU which has been a massive hit here at Vortez.

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+1 for going backwards in tech.

So it overclocks just as good as a GTX580 ...that's cool!

why buy one of these when you can get a gtx580 for like 10 dollars more or refurbished for 10 dollars less..

Actually with the latest drivers it trades blows with the 580 so overclocking is just icing on the cake. The particular review linked to in the OP is using old slower 11.12 drivers...lazy reviewers.

Not a huge fan of that review, but I am a huge fan of my new 7870

My reference PowerColor showed up yesterday, and I am very, very happy with it. Running the latest beta drivers.

So far I've had it at 1250/1450 with the reference cooler playing BF3 for an hour or so last night without an issue. Slider maxes out at 1300/1450, so I'll see if I can hit that tonight. Max temp last night was 67*C.

As it is currently, I'm 10-12*C cooler than my OC'd GTX 460 was and far faster. I would imagine one of the cards with a non-reference cooler would run cooler and maybe quieter overall, but my case has very poor exhaust airflow, so this was my best option because I wanted a rear exhaust. Definitely don't regret it

EDIT: Well 1300 freezes BF3 almost right away, and 1275 freezes after a few minutes. I'm just going to leave it at 1250 as I can play for hours at that. Still looks to be higher than most reviews get it up to.