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Like the AMD reference designed Radeon HD 7950, the Gigabyte OC edition measures 24cm long. This makes it 1 centimeter shorter than the old HD 6870. For reference, the Radeon HD 7900 series cards measure 27cm long (10.6 in) making them difficult if not impossible to install into smaller mid-size ATX computer cases.
The HD 7870 GPU is fabricated on a 28nm process, making it possible for AMD to squeeze 4313 million transistors into a 352mm2 die.
The GPU core is clocked at 1000MHz, 11% higher than the HD 6870, and the GDDR5 memory operates at 1200MHz (4.8GHz DDR), which is 14% higher than the HD 6870. The HD 7870 is paired with a 256-bit wide memory bus providing a theoretical bandwidth of 153.6GB/s or 14% more memory bandwidth than the HD 6870.
However Gigabyte has overclocked their Radeon HD 7870 from a 1GHz core to 1.1GHz, which is a 10% increase. The GDDR5 memory has been left at 4.8GHz so it will be interesting to see how much impact the core overclock has on performance.
While the HD 6870 typically came loaded with a 1GB frame buffer, the 7870 has been upgraded to 2GB. We've found that when using multi-monitor setups at extreme resolutions, the larger buffer of AMD's cards provide a significant advantage over Nvidia's, which are limited to 1536MB for the most part. The HD 7870's core configuration also differs from the 6870’s. The new card carries 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs, up 14% from 1120 SPUs and 43% more TAUs from just 56.
Like the Radeon HD 7970 flagship, the HD 7870 adopts the 28nm design process and is also PCI Express 3.0-compatible. The new interface spec doubles its predecessor's bandwidth to 32GB/s. Unfortunately, no current processor or chipset supports this technology, so we'll have to test it down the road.
What makes Gigabyte's iteration unique is its WindForce 3X solution with "Triangle Cool" technology. The cooler employs three 75mm ultra quiet PWM fans connected to a custom shroud. Under these fans is a massive heatsink consisting of three main parts connected by 8mm copper heatpipes. At the heart of this setup is the biggest block which has a unique RAM heatsink to cool the GDDR5 modules. This heatsink also features Triangle Cool technology, which uses a series of fins and triangular clip modules to better direct airflow over the heatsink.
Gigabyte says its Triangle Cool technology can reduce temperatures by up to 10% over traditional designs, so we're keen to see just how cool this HD 7870 runs.
To feed the card enough juice, AMD includes dual 6-pin PCI Express power connectors. This is the same setup used on the HD 6950, 5870, 6870 as well as the GTX 580 and 570 graphics cards.
Naturally, the HD 7870 supports Crossfire, so it has a pair of connectors to bridge two or more cards. The only other ports are on the I/O panel where you'll find a dual DL-DVI connector, a single HDMI 1.4a port, and two mini-DisplayPort 1.2 sockets. All HD 7870s support a max resolution of 2560x1600 on up to three monitors. With a multi-stream hub, using the mini-DisplayPort 1.2 sockets, the card can power up to six screens. |
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ProX |
Posted on: 03/22/2012 09:42 PM
Nice card, kinda makes the 7950 a little pointless. Thanks for the review as always  |
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Flikka |
Posted on: 04/11/2012 08:16 AM
Great card but what is the total length with the Windforce cooler? I dought it can be 280mm as specified on the Gigabyte product page. |