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For the last week we have been busy testing a plethora of new 7 series graphics cards from various AMD partners. Today we are looking at the latest card to be released from XFX, the HD7870 Black Edition which features a custom metal cooler, twin fans and overclocked ‘out of the box' settings.
XFX are one of AMD's primary partners and for the last year they have been releasing some great discrete solutions for all price sectors of the market.
All the partners lately have been highlighting their own buzzword technology claims. XFX offer ‘Ghost – Thermal Technology' into the mix.
What is this? Well XFX say “Through rigorous testing and analysis we have discovered the optimal thermal design that allows air to pass through the heatsink directly to the PCB and core components. Older enclosed designs often trapped the heat, creating a bottle neck at the exhaust, this can be remedied but at the cost of a higher fan speed which creates excess noise. Our design allows us to keep the fan speeds lower while allowing the heat to dissipate evenly throughout the card.”
| Product | AMD HD7970 | AMD HD7950 | XFX HD7870 Black Edition |
AMD HD7850 |
| Core Clock speed | 925mhz | 800mhz | 1000mhz (1,050mhz) | 860mhz |
| Transistors | 4.31 billion | 4.31 billion | 2.8 billion | 2.8 billion |
| Stream Processors | 2,048 | 1,792 | 1,280 | 1,024 |
| Compute Performance | 3.79 TFLOPS | 2.87 TFLOPS | 2.56 TFLOPS | 1.76 TFLOPS |
| Texture Units | 128 | 112 | 80 | 64 |
| Texture Fillrate | 118.4 GT/s | 89.6 GT/s | 80 GT/s | 55.0 GT/s |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| Pixel Fillrate | 29.6 GP/s | 25.6 GP/s | 32.0 GP/s | 27.52 GP/s |
| Z/Stencil | 128 | 128 | 128 | 128 |
| Memory Type | 3GB GDDR5 | 3GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Clock | 1,375mhz | 1,250mhz | 1,200mhz (1,250mhz) | 1,200mhz |
| Memory Data Rate | 5.5 GBps | 5.0 Gbps | 4.8 Gbps (5.0Gbps) | 4.8 Gbps |
| Memory Bandwidth | 264 GB/s | 240 GB/s | 153.6 GB/s | 153.6 GB/s |
XFX have opted for a modest overclock of 50mhz on the core, from 1,200mhz to 1,250mhz. The GDDR5 memory also receives a 50mhz clock increase to 1,250mhz (5.0Gbps effective). The Gigabyte HD7870 Overclock Edition that we reviewed earlier this week received a 100mhz overclock to 1,100mhz on the core, but didn't have a memory boost at all.
those cards are pure sex. Id probably want the 7950 though if I was getting an XFX DD card. seems to make more sense, especially when overclocked to the limit.
Good cards, but far too many to choose from in the last 2 weeks. hard to know what to buy (if I was in the market).
HD6850 is the better value card IMO, its under £200 now in the UK, 6870 is too closely priced to 6950 IMO