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Like the AMD reference designed Radeon HD 7870, the HIS 7870 IceQ Turbo 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 HIS 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 this HIS iteration unique is its IceQ solution with "Black Hole Impeller". The cooler uses a large 80 x 21.5mm blower fan which is connected to a custom shroud. In front of this fan is a massive heatsink which features two 6mm copper heatpipes along with two larger 8mm heatpipes.
Connected to the large copper base of the heatsink is unique RAM heat spreader which is designed to cool the GDDR5 modules. HIS claims that this cooler is up to 25 degrees cooler than AMD’s reference version.
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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emphus |
Posted on: 04/04/2012 12:04 PM
what a beast. I was seriously looking at buying a 7950 next week but this thing is so similar performance wise and looks so cool I might get one instead. what would have been perfect is if you had of reviewed this as well. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161407 |
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ramjet |
Posted on: 04/04/2012 02:43 PM
I would like to see how 2 of these handle themselves in SLI **hint**hint**  |