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.