Price: 359.99



Introduction:

This year AMD blew us away with its HD 7900 series GPUs, each equipped with a 28nm Tahiti core. One month later AMD released the not as impressive Cape Verde core. This can be found in the HD 7700 series, which was targeted at the lower end of the GPU scale. Two months after the release of the 79xx series, AMD added the Pitcairn core to be paired up with the rest of the Northern Island GPUs. The Pitcairn core, as you probably know by now, can be found in the HD 7800 series cards. Like its older siblings the Pitcairn core uses AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. So what can you expect with the GCN architecture? Up to 20 compute units, or 1280 Stream processors, up to 153.6GB/s of memory bandwidth, 32 render back-ends, dual geometry engines, and a 9th generation tesselator. This means you can expect a 28nm process, PCI-E Gen 3 support, as well as both AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power technology. The HD 7800 series will also be capable of AMD Eyefinity 2.0 and AMD App Acceleration. AMD hopes that this will make the 7870 and 7850 powerful enough to make you want to upgrade from your 5870 and 5850, respectively.

The 7XXX series of AMD GPUs have been somewhat overshadowed by NVIDIA's release of the GTX 680. However, do to limited availability of NVIDIA's new product the 7 series may still be a very viable option for some. Today we will be looking at the Sapphire HD 7870 GHz Edition. This card features a factory overclock as well as a dual fan cooling solution. How will it stack up to the competition? Let's find out!

Closer Look

The Sapphire card used packaging similar to other 7 series cards from the Sapphire brand. Sapphire chose to use a black and green, military-style color scheme. As always the Sapphire packaging features the lady mascot. However, this time around she is wielding a hefty assault rifle, as opposed to a sword. The card's packaging features the card's name, as well as the manufacturer on the front of the packaging. The box also features a few of the card's key specifications. For example, the card features 2GB of GDDR5 memory! Flipping the packaging over reveals a much more detailed set of specifications and features!

The sides of the Sapphire box feature the Sapphire logo, as well as some extra specifications of the card. Each side is black, which blends into the color scheme of the rest of the packaging.

Sapphire uses a cardboard inner packaging. Sapphire's inner packaging is made of a brown biodegradable box. Opening it up reveals the Sapphire HD 7870 nice and secure in an anti-static bag. Located underneath the card is the included accessories.