Diamond Radeon HD 7870GHz Edition Review Video Card   Page 1

Reviewer: Chris Ledenican Article Publish Date: 10/23/2012

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

 

 

 

The AMD Radeon HD 7870GHz Edition graphics card is designed to push a massive amount of pixels at 1080p and do so with gusto. In fact this graphics card has the ability easily power through next gen games such as Sleeping Dogs, Max Payne 3 and Borderlands 2 at 1080p with all the eye candy enabled and still achieve an average frame rate above 30FPS. Of course it isn’t going to run games at the same level as the Nvidia GTX 680, or AMD Radeon HD 7970, but it also comes with a more affordable price tag, making it more accessible to a wider range of gamers.

The reason being the performance is that the HD 7870GHz Edition is based on the AMD’s latest Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, which is a revolutionary new design that eliminates the previous VLIW design of the Northern Island’s architecture for non-VLIW SIMD engine. Additionally, the HD 7870 internally houses 20 GCN cores, 32 raster units and 128 texture units, all while boasting a transistor count of 1.4 billion in a 212mm² die. In addition, the core clock of the HD 7870GHz Edition is set at 1GHz, which is due to the fabrication process and it is precisely this reason the HD 7870 performs as well as it does.

Beyond just the core architecture though, the HD 7870GHz Edition also has an ace in the hole, as it were. I am referring to the memory interface of the graphics card which runs on a 256-bit bus and has 2GB of GDDR5 memory to draw from. This is going to allow the HD 7870 to buffer frames faster than most mid-range graphics cards on the market, which in turn allows it to be more capable when running games at high settings and resolutions.

The HD 7870GHz Edition graphics card we are going to be examining today is from Diamond, and while it doesn’t boost an over the top thermal solution, or higher than default clock speeds it manages to leverage all the HD 7870GHz Edition has to offer without increasing the price, as is case with graphics cards that feature an aftermarket design.