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
Overclocking: Gaming Performance
Since both of our retail cards reached the same overclock, for the purpose of our graphs we’re simply listing the same number for both cards. In turn both cards are listed so that anyone flipping through the graphs without reading the accompanying text can still see both cards.
With our overclocks in hand, the core clock difference between these overclocked cards and the 7950 starts to get ridiculous. At 1200MHz for the 7870s, this is a massive 50% core clock advantage on the 7950; the overclocked 7870s have 50% more frontend and ROP performance compared to AMD’s next card up at stock, furthering the gap caused by this effect.
The end result is that more often than not, the overclocked 7870s can meet or beat the stock 7950. Even the 7970’s lead is uncomfortably narrow at times, such as in Battlefield 3 at 1920. Ultimately if you liked the 7950’s stock performance it’s possible to get something similar for upwards of $80 less if you don’t mind some overclocking, and chance is on your side.
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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?