VTX3D HD 7870 Black Tahiti LE 2 GB

[W1zzard]

Originally Posted by las

Can someone tell me what this card limits is in AMD Overdrive? aka OC in AMD Control Center

on the temps & clock profiles page: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/V..._Black/32.html

[las]

Originally Posted by W1zzard

on the temps & clock profiles page: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/V..._Black/32.html

Wtf.. Thats some high limits.. Have AMD opened up for proper OC? :P Because i had 1125/1575 as max in Overdrive on my old 7970...

[eidairaman1]

if you want that card of yours to run further use Sapphire Trixx or Afterburner, Overdrive is just AMDs overclocker suite that controls the CPU and GPU via the AVECC

[jamsbong]

Looking at the clock profile, the voltage looks very high especially on blu-ray mode. 1.2 volt!
And 1.29 on gaming???

The first thing you can do to reduce the enormous heat and power consumption would be to reduce the voltage. Anyone tried to manually rewrite these profiles so they are more like a 7950?

Despite this flaw, I think this is a great bargain!

[creativeitservices]

Hi all, first post here

Anyway got the VTX3D 7870 Black for myself recently and must say I am very impressed but also a bit mystified by it. I have mine fitted with an Arctic Cooling Accellero Mono Plus + cooler. For anyone wondering the mounting holes on this card are the same as a 7850/7870 despite it being a Tahiti GPU. Here is my situation and I hope this might help explain the poor overclock scaling.

My card overclocks to 1165 without any artifacts in OCCT after 3 hours- I don't see any point in overclocking the memory on these as there is already sufficient bandwith- great right? But here is the thing, when I benchmark the card in Tomb Raider and 3DMark13 im getting LOWER scores then running the card @ stock speed!! Also the core temps are 10 degrees higher at stock speeds when Benchmarking. So what the hell is going on here? So I throttled back the clock to 1050 and same problem!! All the above was done with the power slider set at +20% . Its as if the card is shutting down shaders when overclocked because it cannot get enough power to run all of them.

So please if you have this card and you have overclocked it verify that your ovrclock is actually giving you higher frame rates. Unfortunately I still haven't found an app that can change the core voltage on this card so Overclocking is out of the question at the moment- great card at stock speed though.

One more issue I have found- with the latest ATI 13.3 Beta driver the card suffers from the Clock Drop seen on other Tahiti LE Cards. Even with the power slider set to +20% the card will slow down to 500MHZ on the core after gaming for a whilen

[rodneyhchef]

Just got mine. Running the usual things like GPU-z on it. I notice mine reports it is running PCI-E x16 1.1 when the board is 2.0 I notice the same info is reported in your GPU-z screenshot Wizz

EDIT - when I run the render test the value goes up to 2.0 but when I close it it returns to 1.1

[creativeitservices]

Originally Posted by rodneyhchef

Just got mine. Running the usual things like GPU-z on it. I notice mine reports it is running PCI-E x16 1.1 when the board is 2.0 I notice the same info is reported in your GPU-z screenshot Wizz

EDIT - when I run the render test the value goes up to 2.0 but when I close it it returns to 1.1

Strange, will check that out on my card- think I may have found the problem with my card, im using MSI Afterburner now instead of AMD Overdrive/ Sapphire Trixx and got higher scores clocked @ 1040- will keep pushing the clocks until it starts to have a negative effect on the scores

[ChristTheGreat]

Originally Posted by Delta6326

Great review W1zz love your work. You might as well just buy this if you where going to get a 7950. For me I would rather buy the 660 TI it's smaller, less power hungry and same speed.

Well, most people doesn't use their game 24/7, so I guess AMD zerocore is better...

Originally Posted by Casecutter

Ah, Egg has the Myst is $240 -AR$20 shipping $3, while most GTX660Ti that are AIB customs (nicer than reference), but not the Über OC’s will range around $260-280 with rebates more often of $20.

While I appreciate the merits for size and power... are such things worth the 15% adder? I mean a reference GTX660Ti is 10” vs. the Myst 10.5” big whoop. While hard to compare a GTX660Ti reference card for it’s OC’n as I don’t remember many reviews for that design or many that did much in overclocking.

Perhaps the best GTX650Ti deal is the MSI N660TI-2GD5/OC, a comparable single fan cooler (utilizes just 2 H-P vs. Myst 3 H-P’s) that is $270 –AR$20 w/FS. Can’t find any reviews for this humble model so can’t say how it might OC, while it’s almost an inch shorter at 9.64”.

If I'm dropping $270 then I'm going for the Sapphire 7950 3Gb 384-bit with Booost clock (100352-2L) for $10 more and not mess with a 192-Bit 2Gb card. With it's dual fan and five H-P cooler it pretty well established for OC'n.

On my side, I did look to those Tahiti LE, but they were less cooled than my MSI TFIII. Another reason why I choosed the HD7950 over a Tahiti LE and nVidia card, was Crysis 3 + Bioshock Infinite as a game bundle.


By the way, thanks W1z for the review,

[kmetek]

which one to choose, VTX3D // POWERCOLOR MYST // CLUB 3D?

[DarkOCean]

Originally Posted by kmetek

which one to choose, VTX3D // POWERCOLOR MYST // CLUB 3D?

all tahiti le cards you mentioned are based on the same pcb with the same cooler(those that use one fan), so get the cheaper one.

[kmetek]

thanks, will choose the one with never setlle reloaded

[TRWOV]

Originally Posted by rodneyhchef

Just got mine. Running the usual things like GPU-z on it. I notice mine reports it is running PCI-E x16 1.1 when the board is 2.0 I notice the same info is reported in your GPU-z screenshot Wizz

EDIT - when I run the render test the value goes up to 2.0 but when I close it it returns to 1.1

That's a power saving feature. To keep 2.0 active all the time go into Power Options and select High Performance (it might be hidden under "show more energy plans").