Introduction

Earlier this year, AMD launched their Radeon HD 7800 Series. The GPU Pitcairn is a downscale from the HD 7900 "Tahiti" silicon that introduced AMD's new Graphics Core Next architecture. Targeting a wide price-range in-between $250-$350, the HD 7800 series falls into the market-segment both AMD and NVIDIA have referred to as the "sweet-spot" 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.



PowerColor's HD 7870 PCS+ Vortex II is a fully customized HD 7870 design implementation. It comes with a dual-fan cooler and a large overclock out of the box, making it one of the fastest HD 7870 cards around. We have seen many price reductions bringing the price of the HD 7870 down significantly. At this time, the PowerColor HD 7870 Vortex II retails at $290, which is $40 higher than the cheapest HD 7870 available.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• CrossFire bridge
• Mini-DP to DP adapter
• DVI adapter

The Card

PowerColor's card looks nice thanks to the red highlights on the cooler. The heatpipes stick out a bit; better check to make sure it fits into your case.


The card requires two slots in your system.


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

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support. The DisplayPort outputs are version 1.2, enabling 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 frame rates or better image-quality settings.


Pictured above are 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.