ASUS Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2 GB

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 ASUS Radeon HD 7870 Direct CU II is a custom implementation of the HD 7870, using a custom heatsink and increased clock rates of 1150 MHz GPU and 1250 MHz memory, which should provide a nice performance boost over the reference design.

Radeon HD 7870 Market Segment Analysis

	Radeon HD 6870	GeForce GTX 560 Ti	Radeon HD 6950	GeForce GTX 570	Radeon HD 6970	Radeon HD 7850	Radeon HD 7870	ASUS HD 7870 DCII	GeForce GTX 580	Radeon HD 7950	Radeon HD 7970	GeForce GTX 680
Shader Units	1120	384	1408	480	1536	1024	1280	1280	512	1792	2048	1536
ROPs	32	32	32	40	32	32	32	32	48	32	32	32
Graphics Processor	Barts	GF114	Cayman	GF110	Cayman	Pitcairn	Pitcairn	Pitcairn	GF110	Tahiti	Tahiti	GK104
Transistors	1700M	1950M	2640M	3000M	2640M	2800M	2800M	2800M	3000M	4310M	4310M	3500M
Memory Size	1024 MB	1024 MB	2048 MB	1280 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	1536 MB	3072 MB	3072 MB	2048 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	320 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	384 bit	384 bit	384 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	900 MHz	823 MHz	800 MHz	732 MHz	880 MHz	860 MHz	1000 MHz	1100 MHz	772 MHz	800 MHz	925 MHz	1006 MHz+
Memory Clock	1050 MHz	1002 MHz	1250 MHz	950 MHz	1375 MHz	1200 MHz	1200 MHz	1250 MHz	1002 MHz	1250 MHz	1375 MHz	1058 MHz
Price	$155	$210	$240	$330	$340	$250	$360	$360	$390	$450	$550	$500