AMD Radeon 7870 2GB Graphics Card Review

As always, there are no goodies or accessories delivered with the card, as these are all parts added to the package by the partners. This trend also continues with the cooler with its reference design.

On the top of the card, we find power provided through two six pin PCIe connectors.

On the other end of the PCB the is a single CrossfireX connection, meaning this card will only work in a two-way configuration as opposed to a 3 or more way.

The heads on the rear of the card give us connectivity via two mini DP, one HDMI and one DVI. The 7870 will support upto a total of six displays when daisy chaining displayport enabled screens or by using a displayport hub.

The stock cooler uses a large cooper based heatsink with 3 large heatpipes to draw heat away from the GPU core.

Laid bare, we can see that there is a lot of potential for the board once the partners get their hands on it and we can soon expect to see some bespoke designs with the additional feature here and there. Around the GPU core we find the eight GDDRS Hynix memory ICs totalling 2GB of total capacity.

The 7800 series cards are based on the 28nm ‘Pitcairn’ GPU core, which we will see can pack quite a punch in relation to its bigger brother the ‘Tahiti’ core. From this we expect some fantastic overclocking potential both for the partners but also for the end user who wishes to push their card that little bit further.

As we have come to know, AMD’s partners will with no doubt come out with a plethora of overclocked and tweeked variants of the 7870, but even at stock we see a core clock speed of 1000MHz (1GHz) and a memory clock of 1200MHz (4.8GHz effective).