welcome to my much delayed unboxing of the Radeon HD 7870 from XFX this is
their core Edition card but even though it's a core or like a more basic Edition
card I guess compared to their Double D Card which has two cooling fans this is
still a GHz Edition card so the GPU
itself is clocked at 1 GHz so this is
not based on the same GPU as the 7950 and the 7970 which um are using a larger
die a more complicated chip to produce this is using the pit Karen core which
is the same one as is in the 7870 as
well as the 7850 now performance- wise The 7870
Falls just in the range of a GTX 570 or
580 usually falling in between those two cards from the competition but because
this is manufactured on a more advanced process it is able to achieve that
performance with less power consumption as well as a lower price so let's see
what XFX includes with their particular card here a crossfire Bridge that's a
standard length one however if your motherboard requires a longer one they
usually come with them they do not disturb I'm gaming door hanger I have
their old one from back when XFX was NVIDIA exclusive over there on my door
I've also got a driver DVD download the latest off DMD website
limited warranty terms for full details please refer to support Central so they
actually don't include that in the documentation they just want you to go online and check it out that's sort of
smart quick install guide install guide for the drivers Pro Series power supply
brochure for their power supplies as well some other great XFX products
another brochure okay so that that's pretty much all the information we need
let's have a look at the XFX Radeon 7870
itself now these have been in uh in in a
bit of a production shortfall for the most part since they were released but
what that should tell you about them is that they deliver a very compelling
price to Performance ratio and also let
me just take this off here and also that uh people are demanding these cards so
let's have a closer look at this particular card XFX does such a good job
of the Aesthetics and the overall look of their gpus but let's dig a little bit
deeper and find out how welld designed this is check this out so this is a very
beefy cooler considering that even though this is a an Enthusiast class of
card this is still not the highest n GPU which you find on the 7950 and the 7970
so they've put an aluminum uh unisync
across almost the entire card itself which is making contact with key
components that do need to be cooled while staying well elevated over other
components that don't need to be cooled so you can see there's gaps in it here
here down in there I hope you can see that where you can see right through to
the PCB which is giving you air flow over the components that don't need to
be directly uh contacted by the unisync and uh and providing extra
cooling to those that do so that's a very neat design choice I actually haven't seen that before it then uses an
aluminum shroud which has like a brushed look as well as some sort of chromy
looking accents with their ghost thermal technology slogan on here as well as the
XFX logo here we've got a standard is I guess it's getting standard these days
although it's uh still not on many reference cards but an 80 mm fan in the
middle we've also got four heat pipes that are carrying heat away from the GPU
itself can you see those okay away from the GPU itself you'll be able to see
them better from the top and then out to two aluminum fin arrays on either side
of the fan itself so that is how the GPU is getting cooled they yeah like I said
they're so good at this check this out so we've got another metal brushed piece
which is radon red is it AMD red I mean
AMD's color has never been red but they're still using the ATI red on the
graphics cards which looks absolutely fantastic power for this card is
provided by two PCIe six pin power adapters and it supports up to two-way
Crossfire so AMD has removed the option for multi-way Crossfire configurations
from this card it makes sense because honestly if you're buying three um sort
of step down gpus you should probably just be buying one or two higher-end
ones instead because it's going to yield better performance due to the way that
Crossfire and actually SLI technology both inherently scale now in terms of
output options this is a 2 GB graphics card which means that it is more than
capable of driving slightly older games
and by older I don't mean like 3 four years old I mean like sort of last year
6 months ago like current generation as well as older games at extremely high
resolution so having that extra Graphics memory makes all the difference in the
world because you have to load all the textures into the memory so even if you
have a high performance card that's maybe from the competition say like a
GTX 570 with only 1.2 gigs of memory the
7870 will absolutely rock it as soon as
you start to increase the resolution Beyond a single monitor so what that
means is that this monitor or this card not only supports up to four displays
out concurrently using two dvis a DVI and an
HDMI or a DVI and an HDMI and then the two mini display ports but it can
actually drive games as long as you're not GPU bound it has enough memory to
hold all the textures necessary that you don't end up crippling the performance
this is a PCIe 3.0 16x card so that
rounds out it's sort of current to to future generation technology so that
means with your new ivybridge system or your Sandy Bridge e system um you will
be able to take advantage of all of that bandwidth although it's quite debatable
whether or not that's going to make any performance difference whatsoever so
basically good pricing good performance and really the reason I'm doing this
unboxing is cuz I really needed one so that I could test it against the upcoming GTX oh wait I should probably
shouldn't say so that I can release this video right away thanks for checking out
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