Introduction

Earlier this 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 HD 7870 Twin Frozr III II is a custom implementation of the HD 7870, using a custom heatsink and increased clock rates of 1050 MHz GPU and 1200 MHz memory, which should provide a nice performance boost over the reference design.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• Mini DP to DP Adapter
• CrossFire Bridge
• 2x PCI-E power cable

The Card

MSI is using their Twin Frozr III cooler on the card, which we have seen on other models before. The cooler covers the whole card, which means its two fans will provide plenty of airflow to all components on the board. Please note that the heatsink extends a bit beyond the PCB area, which could lead to difficulties installing the card in smaller cases.


The card requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one full size HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPorts. You may use all the outputs at the same time, thanks to AMD's superior display output architecture.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU, too. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes HD audio and support for Blu-ray 3D movies. The DisplayPort outputs are version 1.2 which enables the use of hubs and Multi-Stream transport.


You may combine up to two HD 7870 cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration for higher framerates or better image quality settings.


Pictured above are photos of the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.