The Retail Radeon HD 7870 Review: HIS 7870 IceQ Turbo & PowerColor PCS+ HD7870
by Ryan Smith on March 19, 2012 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- PowerColor
- Radeon HD 7000
- HIS
Crysis, Metro, DiRT 3, Shogun 2, & Batman
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.2.3.1022 |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 7950 AMD Radeon HD 7870 AMD Radeon HD 7850 AMD Radeon HD 7770 AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 6950 AMD Radeon HD 6870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 295.73 AMD Catalyst Beta 8.95.5 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
As both the PCS+ HD7870 and the IceQ Turbo 7870 ship with an identical core overclock and similar memory clocks, the performance of the two will be nearly identical. The PCS+ has an edge (however slim) in all situations, but as we’ll see there’s very little separating the two cards when it comes to performance.
Overall the factory overclocks on the PCS+ HD7870 and IceQ Turbo 7870 net about a 5% to 7% increase in game performance compared to the stock 7870. The lack of a significant memory overclock on either card appears to be holding back performance some, keeping game performance gains from reaching parity with the core overclocks.
Interestingly, because of the same frontend & ROP reasons we saw the 7870 do so well relative to the 7950 in our initial review, these factory overclocked cards do one better. Both cards overtake the 7950 at times, such as under DiRT 3 and Total War. More interestingly perhaps is that with the 7870 already nipping at the GTX 580’s heels in these games, the overclocked cards also regularly surpass the GTX 580 in 3 out of the 5 games so far.
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Ryan Smith - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
Good question. We'll answer it sometime in the next couple of weeks.Roland00Address - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
now I just have to wait for the resultstijag - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
The launch date should be today, but i'm not seeing these cards available on any of the major retailers with any reasonable availability.Very disappointing. Hopefully there will actually be available inventory of these.
Peanutsrevenge - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
Please, for the love of god, stop putting an OC'd mid card against stock top card.All I ask is that you include the higher end cards OC'd figures in aswell when your mentioning the comparisson.
I'm so sick of reading
"Card X often equals and sometimes beats it's $x.xx pricier cousin"
yes, until you make it fair and show the OC'd results for the other card.
Either that, or don't point out the obvious and irrelivant information, just let us go and look @ Bench, which the clued up out of us here will do. You're just feeding the inept with misleading information.
End Rant.
cjs150 - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
I disagree what it shows is that with a bit of tweaking you can get the same or better performance that a stock higher end card but at a lower price. This is important when many of us want to stick to a budget and get as much bang for our buck as possible.Personally I would just stick a watercooling block on the standard card and overclock the hell out of it - and I get lower noise than these fancy cards
Iketh - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
Yes but you need to also show the other card's OC results... this is the pointFrallan - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
Yes Pls - however the only 78XX waterblock Ive seen so far costs 90€ (aboutish 110 USD I believe) and thats just to expensive./F
doylecc - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
I think the point of comparing less expensive OCed cards to more expensive stock cards is value. If you can get the same performance (or nearly so) as the expensive stock card, but for substantially less money, then the cheaper OCed card may be the way to go, for the budget conscious.Of course, if money is no object, then just get the top card and OC it.
What I would like to see is an article comparing the OCed cards from both companies with each other (and their base stock cards for reference). Then show them in CrossFire and SLI. That is where you will see the maximum performance.
Death666Angel - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
I am all for OC benchmarks, but I would also like to see OC 7950/7970 results. Your argument makes no sense, because why would you OC a cheap card but not a more expensive one?hieuhef - Monday, March 19, 2012 - link
Because not everyone can spend $450 on a card? Did you read what you responded to?