Club3D is at the forefront of the Tahiti LE movement. Their HD 7870 jokerCard was announced first, well before cards from TUL (PowerColor and VTX3D). Other manufacturers have either decided not to release Tahiti LE-based SKUs, or are waiting for AMD to make a move. In our testing, we see very decent performance results from the Tahiti LE. Performance-wise, it is just 2% slower than the HD 7950, but 8% faster than the HD 7870, which means that the HD 7870 jokerCard is much closer to the HD 7950. This is also true for most of the PCB design, which is based on high-quality components; it is not an ultra-low-cost version of the HD 7950 PCB. While we have no baseline values for a comparison, overclocking this 1536-shader card worked better than expected. A maximum GPU clock of 1210 MHz is HD 7970 / GHz territory. Memory overclocked well too, with 1620 MHz, but seems to be held back a bit by the Elpida chips that do not overclock as well as their counterparts from Samsung or Hynix. Kudos to Club 3D for using faster 6 GHz chips instead of cheaper and slower 5 GHz ones.
The biggest drawback of a Tahiti based HD 7870 is its power draw, which is much higher than on Pitcairn-based boards, especially during gaming. The good news is that single-monitor idle power consumption remains unchanged, which will be important to many users since their PCs spend most of the day in that power state. Looking at performance-per-watt in games, the HD 7870 jokerCard is the least power-efficient card from AMD. It even matches the HD 7970 GHz Edition in that metric.
It comes as no surprise that this increased power draw causes increased heat output, which means that the cooler has to work harder to keep the card cool under heavy load. Temperatures are perfectly fine at 73°C, but they are higher than on HD 7870 cards; those run into the upper 60°s, with less fan-noise output. Idle fan-noise of the jokerCard is outstanding; the card will barely be audible during productive work or Internet browsing. The cooler makes its presence known once you start playing games, but does not end up being as noisy as most other cards from the HD 7900 Series. Custom-design GTX 660 Ti cards will be much quieter for gaming, though.
We couldn't find a USD price for the jokerCard, so we converted its Euro price to USD, which brings it to around $270. This means that the card is $30 more expensive than a reference design HD 7870, or $10 cheaper than a GTX 660 Ti. I find it difficult to declare the HD 7870 jokerCard a clear winner against either of those cards at such a price, but that would drastically change with a price in the $240 range, which could also justify the increased power draw. The jokerCard does have an ace up its sleeve with its CrossFire support. While it does not support pairing with a HD 7800 Series card based on "Pitcairn," it can be paired up with a HD 7950 or HD 7970, which could provide a low-cost upgrade path for existing users of HD 7950 and HD 7970 cards; that is, if they are looking to boost their rig's performance a bit without spending $300-$400 on a second card.
If you are in the market for a HD 7950, then the Tahiti-based HD 7870 is a great choice that is significantly cheaper ($270 vs. $310) but only a tiny bit slower (2%). I actually think that its price difference is one of the main reasons for the lack of more Tahiti LE cards. Board manufacturers are worried that such a new product might have a negative impact on the sales of their existing HD 7950 inventory. These cards are already priced quite competitively, but the extra 1 GB of memory does add to the price without doing much for the performance of the card.