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
Final Words
Being in the business of producing video cards is often not an easy feat, as a GPU manufacturer’s partners only have limited control over the resulting product. At the end of the day most of the performance of a GPU is dictated by its design and fabrication, so partners need to find ways to differentiate themselves not only from each other, but to meaningfully differentiate themselves from the reference products.
This is why AMD’s partners are so happy with the 7000 series. The overclocking headroom in Cape Verde, Pitcairn, and even Tahiti translates into room for them to play with factory overclocks, allowing them to create cards that are meaningfully different from the reference cards in performance. So long as partners can sell all of their GPUs, both high clocking and not, then factory overclocked models are a textbook upsale that lets them grab some more profit in what’s otherwise a cutthroat business. Coupled with a chance to further differentiate themselves based on coolers, and the 7000 has given partners a chance to stand out in a way they couldn’t on the 6000 series.
As far as today’s cards are concerned, both HIS and PowerColor stand out in different ways. PowerColor’s PCS+ HD7870 is a rather straightforward upsell: for $20 (6%) more PowerColor will sell you a 7870 card that gets 5-7% more performance than a stock 7870. And because of their custom open air cooler, it can do this while being a bit quieter than AMD’s reference design. As has been the case with factory overclocked cards in the past this is really an individual decision – based on our limited data, it looks like most 7870s should be able to hit PowerColor’s factory overclocks – but if you just want a bit more guaranteed performance for a bit more money, PowerColor is happy to sell it to you. If nothing else the performance gain is large enough to justify considering it in the first place.
HIS on the other hand makes things a bit more interesting, and a lot less clear. For their IceQ Turbo 7870 their upsell is $40 (11%) for roughly the same 5-7% performance improvement, and if all you care about is stock performance then it’s not a good deal. The real differentiating factor is the IceQ cooler; it’s simply leaps and bounds ahead of any other 7870 we’ve seen so far, though it gets there by using an extra slot in width. If for some reason you need its impressively effective cooling – say for overvolting in the future – then it’s a great candidate. Otherwise without with the prospect of overvolting it’s effectively limited by the AMD PCB and what Pitcairn can do on stock voltage, in which case its temperature advantage likely won’t translate into any material benefit. But then this is the advantage of the GPU partner system for consumers – a company like HIS can go out and create an overcooled card, even if it's for just a niche market.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
53 Comments
View All Comments
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?