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welcome to my much delayed unboxing of the Radeon HD 7870 from XFX this is

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their core Edition card but even though it's a core or like a more basic Edition

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card I guess compared to their Double D Card which has two cooling fans this is

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still a GHz Edition card so the GPU

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itself is clocked at 1 GHz so this is

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not based on the same GPU as the 7950 and the 7970 which um are using a larger

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die a more complicated chip to produce this is using the pit Karen core which

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is the same one as is in the 7870 as

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well as the 7850 now performance- wise The 7870

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Falls just in the range of a GTX 570 or

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580 usually falling in between those two cards from the competition but because

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this is manufactured on a more advanced process it is able to achieve that

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performance with less power consumption as well as a lower price so let's see

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what XFX includes with their particular card here a crossfire Bridge that's a

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standard length one however if your motherboard requires a longer one they

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usually come with them they do not disturb I'm gaming door hanger I have

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their old one from back when XFX was NVIDIA exclusive over there on my door

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I've also got a driver DVD download the latest off DMD website

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limited warranty terms for full details please refer to support Central so they

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actually don't include that in the documentation they just want you to go online and check it out that's sort of

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smart quick install guide install guide for the drivers Pro Series power supply

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brochure for their power supplies as well some other great XFX products

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another brochure okay so that that's pretty much all the information we need

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let's have a look at the XFX Radeon 7870

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itself now these have been in uh in in a

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bit of a production shortfall for the most part since they were released but

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what that should tell you about them is that they deliver a very compelling

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price to Performance ratio and also let

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me just take this off here and also that uh people are demanding these cards so

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let's have a closer look at this particular card XFX does such a good job

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of the Aesthetics and the overall look of their gpus but let's dig a little bit

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deeper and find out how welld designed this is check this out so this is a very

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beefy cooler considering that even though this is a an Enthusiast class of

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card this is still not the highest n GPU which you find on the 7950 and the 7970

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so they've put an aluminum uh unisync

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across almost the entire card itself which is making contact with key

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components that do need to be cooled while staying well elevated over other

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components that don't need to be cooled so you can see there's gaps in it here

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here down in there I hope you can see that where you can see right through to

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the PCB which is giving you air flow over the components that don't need to

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be directly uh contacted by the unisync and uh and providing extra

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cooling to those that do so that's a very neat design choice I actually haven't seen that before it then uses an

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aluminum shroud which has like a brushed look as well as some sort of chromy

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looking accents with their ghost thermal technology slogan on here as well as the

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XFX logo here we've got a standard is I guess it's getting standard these days

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although it's uh still not on many reference cards but an 80 mm fan in the

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middle we've also got four heat pipes that are carrying heat away from the GPU

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itself can you see those okay away from the GPU itself you'll be able to see

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them better from the top and then out to two aluminum fin arrays on either side

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of the fan itself so that is how the GPU is getting cooled they yeah like I said

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they're so good at this check this out so we've got another metal brushed piece

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which is radon red is it AMD red I mean

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AMD's color has never been red but they're still using the ATI red on the

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graphics cards which looks absolutely fantastic power for this card is

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provided by two PCIe six pin power adapters and it supports up to two-way

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Crossfire so AMD has removed the option for multi-way Crossfire configurations

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from this card it makes sense because honestly if you're buying three um sort

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of step down gpus you should probably just be buying one or two higher-end

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ones instead because it's going to yield better performance due to the way that

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Crossfire and actually SLI technology both inherently scale now in terms of

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output options this is a 2 GB graphics card which means that it is more than

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capable of driving slightly older games

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and by older I don't mean like 3 four years old I mean like sort of last year

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6 months ago like current generation as well as older games at extremely high

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resolution so having that extra Graphics memory makes all the difference in the

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world because you have to load all the textures into the memory so even if you

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have a high performance card that's maybe from the competition say like a

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GTX 570 with only 1.2 gigs of memory the

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7870 will absolutely rock it as soon as

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you start to increase the resolution Beyond a single monitor so what that

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means is that this monitor or this card not only supports up to four displays

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out concurrently using two dvis a DVI and an

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HDMI or a DVI and an HDMI and then the two mini display ports but it can

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actually drive games as long as you're not GPU bound it has enough memory to

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hold all the textures necessary that you don't end up crippling the performance

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this is a PCIe 3.0 16x card so that

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rounds out it's sort of current to to future generation technology so that

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means with your new ivybridge system or your Sandy Bridge e system um you will

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be able to take advantage of all of that bandwidth although it's quite debatable

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whether or not that's going to make any performance difference whatsoever so

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basically good pricing good performance and really the reason I'm doing this

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unboxing is cuz I really needed one so that I could test it against the upcoming GTX oh wait I should probably

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shouldn't say so that I can release this video right away thanks for checking out

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this video don't forget to subscribe to L Tech tips for more unboxings reviews

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