MSI Radeon HD 7870 HAWK 2 GB

Introduction

Last 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 Radeon HD 7870 HAWK is the MSI Lightning's smaller brother. It uses the company's signature Twin Frozr II dual-fan cooler. MSI has also increased the clock speeds of the HD 7870 HAWK to 1100 MHz GPU and 1200 MHz memory.

MSI HD 7870 HAWK Market Segment Analysis

	GeForce GTX 560 Ti	Radeon HD 6950	GeForce GTX 570	Radeon HD 6970	Radeon HD 7850	Radeon HD 7870	MSI Radeon HD 7870 HAWK	GeForce GTX 580	Radeon HD 7950
Shader Units	384	1408	480	1536	1024	1280	1280	512	1792
ROPs	32	32	40	32	32	32	32	48	32
Graphics Processor	GF114	Cayman	GF110	Cayman	Pitcairn	Pitcairn	Pitcairn	GF110	Tahiti
Transistors	1950M	2640M	3000M	2640M	2800M	2800M	2800M	3000M	4310M
Memory Size	1024 MB	2048 MB	1280 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	1536 MB	3072 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	256 bit	320 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	384 bit	384 bit
Core Clock	823 MHz	800 MHz	732 MHz	880 MHz	860 MHz	1000 MHz	1100 MHz	772 MHz	800 MHz
Memory Clock	1002 MHz	1250 MHz	950 MHz	1375 MHz	1200 MHz	1200 MHz	1200 MHz	1002 MHz	1250 MHz
Price	$210	$250	$290	$340	$250	$330	$380	$380	$380