Introduction

MSI HD 7870 HAWK Market Segment Analysis GeForce

GTX 560 Ti Radeon

HD 6950 GeForce

GTX 570 Radeon

HD 6970 Radeon

HD 7850 Radeon

HD 7870 MSI Radeon

HD 7870 HAWK GeForce

GTX 580 Radeon

HD 7950 Shader Units 384 1408 480 1536 1024 1280 1280 512 1792 ROPs 32 32 40 32 32 32 32 48 32 Graphics Processor GF114 Cayman GF110 Cayman Pitcairn Pitcairn Pitcairn GF110 Tahiti Transistors 1950M 2640M 3000M 2640M 2800M 2800M 2800M 3000M 4310M Memory Size 1024 MB 2048 MB 1280 MB 2048 MB 2048 MB 2048 MB 2048 MB 1536 MB 3072 MB Memory Bus Width 256 bit 256 bit 320 bit 256 bit 256 bit 256 bit 256 bit 384 bit 384 bit Core Clock 823 MHz 800 MHz 732 MHz 880 MHz 860 MHz 1000 MHz 1100 MHz 772 MHz 800 MHz Memory Clock 1002 MHz 1250 MHz 950 MHz 1375 MHz 1200 MHz 1200 MHz 1200 MHz 1002 MHz 1250 MHz Price $210 $250 $290 $340 $250 $330 $380 $380 $380

Last month AMD launched their Radeon HD 7800 Series. The GPU, Pitcairn, is a downscale from the HD 7900 "Tahiti" silicon, which introduced AMD's new Graphics Core Next architecture. Targeting a wide price-range between $250-$350, the HD 7800 series falls into the market-segment both AMD and NVIDIA have known to refer to as the "sweetspot" segment. Apart from 1280 stream processors, Pitcairn has 80 Texture Memory Units (TMUs), 32 ROPs (Raster Operations), and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory.The MSI Radeon HD 7870 HAWK is the MSI Lightning's smaller brother. It uses the company's signature Twin Frozr II dual-fan cooler. MSI has also increased the clock speeds of the HD 7870 HAWK to 1100 MHz GPU and 1200 MHz memory.