Index
Review: Silent cooler, serious gaming
Pardon us for starting our review with a marketing slogan but it does a great job in describing Sapphire’s HD 7870 GHz OC Edition graphics card. The slogan says:
After an army-clear introduction, we’ll list a few details that work in the slogan’s favor. Radeon HD 7870 is a performance segment graphics card that uses Pitcairn XT GPU. This GPU runs at standard 1GHz although Sapphire threw in a 50MHz overclock. The GPU measures 212mm square and packs 2.8 billion transistors made in 28nm. So, we’re talking about AMD’s new generation of GPUs that belong to the Southern Islands series with Graphics Core Next architecture. Pitcairn GPU has 20 Compute Units, resulting in 1280 (1D) Shader units, 32 Raster Operation units (ROPs) and 80 texture units on a 256-bit memory interface.
HD 7870 packs 2GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1200MHz but Sapphire overclocked its card to 1250MHz. In short, the 7800 series should bring about 30 percent better performance than HD 6800 series.
What is of special interest to us here is the special cooling which, apart from the overclock, should attract users. Of course, the cooler should provide superior cooling even under big loads. We’re talking about the cooler used by Sapphire dual-extractor technology Dual-X. In other words, the cooler uses two silent fans and a sophisticated heatpipe system made of two 8mm and two 6mm heatpipes.
As usual, Sapphire’s virtual girl is there to spice things up. The cooler has two fans so there was no room for pictures on the card, but the box does look pretty.
Sapphire u ponudi ima dvije HD 7870 GHz Edition cards and if you’re looking for the faster one, you should look for the one with OC moniker (OverClock Edition). Both cards come with identical cooling and the price difference is only €8. The OC edition goes for €316 while the “plain” GHz version goes for €308.