VTX3D HD7870 Black Review (Tahiti LE)

1. Introduction2. VTX3D HD7870 Black Review3. VTX3D HD7870 Black (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.09. Gaming: Alien V Predator (1080p)10. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 2 (1080p)11. Gaming: Resident Evil 5 (1080p)12. Gaming: Far Cry 2 (1200p)13. Gaming: Total War Shogun 2 (1080p)14. Gaming: Dirt Showdown (5760x1080)15. Gaming: Battlefield 3 (5760x1080)16. Gaming: Max Payne 3 (5760x1080) DX1117. Technical: Thermal Dynamics18. Technical: Acoustics Performance19. Technical: Power Consumption20. Technical: Overclocking21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

Today we have something special up for review, the latest VTX3D HD7870 Black which is based on a ‘new revision' of the popular HD7870 graphics card. Selected partners will be releasing new versions of the HD7870 (Tahiti ‘LE') with more horsepower under the hood. This isn't just a simple clock boost however …..

Just how good is the new HD7870 design, based on the Tahiti core previously associated with the HD7950 and HD7970?

This card is so new that we haven't even been briefed yet by AMD so we have no resource material to fall back on. We were informed by a source that card was initially called the 7930, designed for exclusive release into the Russian markets. It made sense for some AMD partners to release it into the general market, especially to target the mid range and remain competitive against Nvidia.

The latest version of GPUz at time of press (0.6.6) won't read the hardware correctly either. This card is not based on the Pitcairn XT core, but a ‘cut down' version of the more expensive Tahiti core. This HD7870 ‘Tahiti LE' version we know is built from 4313M Transistors (like the 7900 series) and has an upgraded 1,536 shader count. The HD7950 has 1,792 shaders and the earlier HD7870 has 1,280 shaders. In this regard the new HD7870 edition slots firmly half way between the standard HD7870 and HD7950.

There are also now 24 SIMD units, up from 20 on HD7870 and less than the HD7950 (which has 28). The ROP count has not changed from 32, although there are now 96 texture units, up from 80 on the HD7870 but still less than the 112 count on the HD7950.

The core is clocked at 975mhz and the 2GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1,500mhz (6Gbps effective) connected via a 256bit memory interface.

These changes should have a significant positive impact on overall performance, but we will find that out shortly. First let us take a look at the card.

Like the Metallica album cover, this box is almost all black, with the word ‘Black' almost hidden from view, only visible in certain light. The product name and company logo are marked in red on the front.

The bundle is minimal, there are installation instructions, a software disc and a video converter cable.

The card is a simple design, and is not surprisingly, all black. The only red is the company logo, placed in the middle of the fan. The PCB is black as well. We like the fact that this is a very compact card and the cooler isn't overhanging the PCB on any side.

The copper heatpipes emerge from the top of the cooler, as shown above. It is a dual slot cooler.

The VTX3D HD7870 Black is Crossfire capable in a two way configuration.

The card demands power from two 6 pin PCI power connectors.

The VTX3D HD7870 Black features a single DVI port, a full sized HDMI port and two mini Displayports. This card is EyeFinity capable, as expected. Hot air will be expelled out the rear of the cooler, which earns it a bonus point.

The VTX3D HD7870 Black ships with a substantial cooler, featuring three thick, direct touch copper heatpipes, which run into two separate racks of aluminum fins on either side of the base.

VTX3D are using high grade Elpida GDDR5 memory, marked ‘W2032BBBG 60-F'. This is rated to run at 5Gbps.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.

To test today we are using our long standing Core i7 970 system, which is overclocked. We have a variety of hardware benchmarked on this system this year which will make for an interesting market comparison.

There will be some slight frame rate differentials between drivers, but we can't retest every card for every review in the last six months. Many cards for comparison we no longer have for updated results for example. If you feel the comparisons are invalid, then use the results from the VTX3D HD7870 Black to compare against your own card with the synthetic tests we use.

Main Test System:

Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.6ghz
Graphics: VTX3D HD7870 Black
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Memory: 6GB ADATA @ 2133mhz 9-10-9-32
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)
Monitor: Dell U3011.

We also change the system later in the review to test Eyefinity across three 24 inch screens.

Ultra High End System (For 3 screen testing):

Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.6ghz
Cooler: Antec 920 H20
Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Power Supply: Enermax Platimax 1200W
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case
Boot Drive: Patriot WildFire 120GB
Secondary Drive: 1TB Samsung
Monitors: Dell U2410 x 3.

Comparison Cards:
KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC
Asus GTX680
Asus GTX670 Direct CU II TOP
Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition (1200mhz core)
Club3D HD7970 RoyalAce Graphics Card
HD7970
HIS HD7970 IceQX2 Turbo
HIS HD7950 IceQ
MSI R7950 Twin Frozr III 3GD5/OC
HD7950
Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition
HD7870
HD7850
HD6990 (880 core)
HD6970
HD6950
HD6870
Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition
XFX HD7770 Black Edition S CFx
HD7770 CFx
HD7770
Sapphire HD7750 Ultimate Edition
HD6790
GTX590 SLi
GTX590
GTX580 SLi
GTX580
GTX570

Software:

Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:

Alien V Predator
Tom Clancy HAWX 2
Resident Evil 5
Far Cry 2
Total War: Shogun 2
Battlefield 3
Dirt Showdown
Max Payne 3

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11

The architectural improvements have resulted in fantastic performance improvements with this intensive Direct X 11 benchmark.  The VTX3D HD7870 Black performs at a similar level to the MSI R7950 Twin Frozr III.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

The final score of 27,902 points is very strong. Direct X 10 performance looks to be on par with the HD7950.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

This is a very impressive result indeed, just shy of 8,000 points and slightly ahead of several HD7950 cards we have tested previously.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here

	VTX3D HD7870 Black
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	196

A score of 196 points is class leading right now, the ideal solution for high definition media playback on a big screen.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparable throughout reviews.

Strong performance from the VTX3D HD7870 Black, averaging 78 frames per second at these settings, just behind the HD7950.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 is an arcade-style flight action game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft. After the events of the first game, the H.A.W.X squadron is sent to Middle East, where a high level of violence is being registered, and the appearance of various insurgents leaders in various hotspots. The team also has to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Russian nuclear weapons. The player will be controlling three groups: one American (Hunter), one British (Munro) and one Russian (Sokov), each with its own pilots and supporting characters. There will also be references to other characters in the Tom Clancy universe.

We are testing in full DX11 mode with all settings to maximum.

Excellent performance from the VTX3D HD7870 Black, averaging over 100 frames per second in this Nvidia friendly title.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

CPU limited with the higher end cards at these settings, but no doubt there is plenty of performance on tap from the VTX3D HD7870 Black.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

Again, no performance issues, averaging 93 frames per second.

Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths.

The VTX3D HD7870 Black manages to match the HIS HD7950 IceQ frame for frame which in itself is a heck of an achievement.

Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007.

We enabled the game across three 24 inch screens at 5760×1080 resolution, with the settings shown above.

Great performance across three screens, averaging 60 frames per second, matching the reference clocked GTX680.

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

The game is playable at these settings, at 5760×1080 resolution. It really is impressive when you look at the results.

Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter in which the player assumes the role of its titular character, Max Payne. Max Payne 3 features a similar over-the-shoulder camera as its predecessors, with the addition of a cover mechanic, while also retaining much of the same run-and-gun style of gameplay. Max Payne 3 also marks the return of bullet-time in action sequences, for which the franchise is notable.

In bullet-time it is possible to see every bullet strike an enemy in detail. New to the series is a “Last Stand” mechanic, which gives the player a grace period after losing all health during which time the player may kill the enemy that wounded them in order to continue playing, however this mechanic is only usable if the player has one or more bottles of painkillers in their possession.

This game proves a little much for the HD7870 Black, even with the improved bandwidth and architectural changes. This title needs an overclocked HD7970 to achieve smooth performance at these settings.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

The cooler performance is very good, peaking at 67c when gaming, and 74c under the Furmark stress test.

We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.

Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

When idle the card is almost silent with the fan spinning around 1,100rpm. When gaming, this spins up to around 1,900 rpm and is noticeable, but never intrusive. Pushing the core harder with the synthetic stress test Furmark raises the fan spin higher (2,100rpm), emitting around 35.7 dBa.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and record the results.

In such an energy aware climate, AMD are making a big deal out of their new ‘ZeroCore Power’ technology. Many solutions today use power gating, clock gating and memory compression to reduce idle power requirements, but ZeroCore power technology can completely power down the core GPU while the rest of the system remains active.

Power consumption is very reasonable considering the power on tap. When gaming the HD7870 Black consumes around 170 watts of power.

To overclock today we relied on the Catalyst Control Center, no software fully supports this card yet, apart from the AMD reference package.

There was a huge amount of headroom on our review sample. We managed to push the core from 975mhz to a whopping 1,155mhz, almost 20% extra! The memory maxed out around 1,600mhz (6.4Gbps effective). Increasing the voltage didn't make a difference to the end result.

This significant overclock translated to a considerable 600 points increase in 3Dmark, scoring over 8,500 points. This is around 2,000 points more than the reference HD7870.

The VTX3D HD7870 Black is without question one of the best value for money high performance graphics cards that we have reviewed this year.

It is common for Nvidia and AMD to release faster clocked versions of their hardware to stay competitive throughout the year, but this new revision HD7870 is a different beast. A handful of AMD's partners will be releasing these new Tahiti LE core 7870's to grab as many sales as possible from performance junkies who want the best bang for buck card they can get their hands on.

We see absolutely no reason not to buy one of these cards. The VTX3D HD7870 Black uses a slightly ‘adjusted' high end Tahiti core, which has the ‘LE' moniker. The Tahiti core has been exclusively HD7950/70 until today. We explained the architectural changes earlier in the review, but in layman's terms, the new card is able to produce frame rate performance previously unheard of at a sub £190 AMD price point.

We feel this release will cause a problem for current AMD sales. Who would want a plain ‘Pitcairn' based HD7870 now? Who in fact would be willing to spend £260+ on a HD7950? An AMD gamer will be saving a minimum of £70-£80 to get equivalent HD7950 performance. That said, this might not be an ideal situation for stores with plenty of stock of the older cards.

The VTX3D HD7870 Black is a very impressive little card, the build quality is excellent and we like the fact that the cooler doesn't extend past the size of the PCB. It also expels hot air outside the chassis. The ‘all black' cooler and PCB design is attractive and will fit right into a windowed case without clashing with any colour scheme.

The cooler performance is commendable. Core temperatures were held at under 70c when gaming, and the single fan doesn't emit a lot of noise, even when pushed hard with a synthetic stress test such as Furmark.

Overclocking headroom on our review sample was exceptional, we almost achieved 20% from the Tahiti core, peaking at 1,155mhz without the need for any voltage increase. Temperatures only increased by a couple of degrees. This will obviously vary between samples, but we are confident there is at least 15% headroom from most of these cards.

ARIA have limited exclusive stock of this card as we go to publication, and they are selling it for £184.99 inc vat.

To sweeten the deal further they are bundling Sleeping Dogs, Hitman: Absolution, Far Cry 3, DiRT: Showdown and Medal of Honor Warfighter. If you need a new video card for some kick ass high resolution gaming and don't want to spend over £200, then this has to be the best bang for buck right now. A fantastic way for AMD to end the year.

Pros:

• quiet
• runs cool.
• huge overclocking headroom.
• bargain pricepoint.
• One of the best value for money solutions on the market today.

Cons:

• Calling it the ‘HD7890' or ‘HD7930' would make more sense.

Kitguru says: The VTX3D is one of the most memorable video cards this year, alongside the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition in the ultra high end.

Become a Patron!