Introduction

Earlier this year 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.



Sapphire's HD 7870 Flex uses the AMD Reference clocks, but comes with a unique feature. It is able to support three DVI/HDMI monitors without the need for an active DisplayPort adapter. This make life easier for users who plan to use EyeFinity.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• DVI Adapter
• HDMI Cable
• DVI to HDMI Adapter
• 2x PCI-E Power Cable
• CrossFire Bridge

The Card

Sapphire is using a custom cooler on their card, I miss the Sapphire identity a bit, but at least the card has a blue PCB, which is a trademark of the company.


The card requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two DVI ports, one full size HDMI port and one full-size DisplayPort. You may use all the outputs at the same time.

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.