# VTX3D HD 7870 Black Edition 2 GB



## W1zzard (Jan 15, 2013)

The VTX3D HD 7870 Black is based on AMD's recent Tahiti LE GPU. It comes with 1536 shaders and very decent clock speeds. As a result, the card is 8% faster than the HD 7870 and almost as fast as the HD 7950 that costs significantly more.

*Show full review*


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## Casecutter (Jan 15, 2013)

We had to go over the identical card as the Club 3D HD 7870 JokerCard that was done a little more than a month back?  I'd like to see the Sapphire more just the cool and fan they use...


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## dj-electric (Jan 15, 2013)

Holy hot damn of overclocking batman!


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## [Ion] (Jan 15, 2013)

Looks like the exact same physical design as my HD7870 PCS+
Based on those overclocking results, I'm going to try pushing my card higher than its current 1050MHz


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## cdawall (Jan 15, 2013)

Is there a us version of these Tahiti LE cards?


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## 3870x2 (Jan 15, 2013)

[Ion] said:


> Looks like the exact same physical design as my HD7870 PCS+
> Based on those overclocking results, I'm going to try pushing my card higher than its current 1050MHz



Im running my 7950 at 1180.  Tahiti should reach 1100 with no issues.


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## W1zzard (Jan 15, 2013)

cdawall said:


> Is there a us version of these Tahiti LE cards?



powercolor myst?


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## cdawall (Jan 15, 2013)

W1zzard said:


> powercolor myst?



Yup that one is floating around for the same price as the normal 7870. Just not many who sell it.


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## Sherlock (Jan 15, 2013)

I am sorry if this have been mentioned in another reviews already. But why are the Nividia cards in these reviews still on 306.23 WHQL drivers? Shouldn't they be run on the latest WHQL(310.90) for fair comparison against 12.11 beta?


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## ErthWen (Jan 15, 2013)

W1zzard said:


> In the Setup page:
> 
> *NVIDIA: 306.23 WHQL*
> ATI: Catalyst 12.8 WHQL
> ATI HD 7000: Catalyst 12.11 Beta



Are you serious?

Are you running "comparative" tests of nvidia/AMD cards WITH this flagrant issue?

Yes, ISSUE. Yo can´t run the AMD cards with the last beta drivers (HD7000), and run the tests with the nvidia cards with a very OLDDDDDDDD WHQL drivers.

*Now, this is the last WHQL driver of nvidia: 310.90.*

But, between it and the 306.23 are:

*310.70 (December, 2012).*
.
.
Many beta drivers.
.
.
*306.97 (October, 2012).*
.
.
Many beta drivers.
.
.
*306.23 (SEPTEMBER, 2012).*


*How do you make a review (January 2013, 4 months ago) with this very old driver* for the nvidia cards?

Holy shit!! This is a very unfair condition for a test&review.


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## W1zzard (Jan 15, 2013)

i'm waiting for new ati whql drivers to rebench

edit: you know what .. fuck you guys .. 2 users banned. please don't come back if you have nothing else to say other than "wut? why old driverz?"

edit edit: bans reversed and created new infraction "Driver Troll"


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## kingkongtol (Jan 16, 2013)

interesting, higher overclocked frequency but slower overclocked performance when compare with club3d
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Club_3D/HD_7870_jokerCard_Tahiti_LE/31.html


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## Delta6326 (Jan 16, 2013)

Great review W1zz love your work. You might as well just buy this if you where going to get a 7950. For me I would rather buy the 660 TI it's smaller, less power hungry and same speed.


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## W1zzard (Jan 16, 2013)

kingkongtol said:


> interesting, higher overclocked frequency but slower overclocked performance when compare with club3d
> http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Club_3D/HD_7870_jokerCard_Tahiti_LE/31.html



i tested this 3 times and it is consistent. could be related to amd's boost technology



Delta6326 said:


> Great review W1zz love your work. You might as well just buy this if you where going to get a 7950. For me I would rather buy the 660 TI it's smaller, less power hungry and same speed.



completely agree


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## Nankuk (Jan 16, 2013)

Nice. I  have one since a month now. Feeling lucky since i saw bunch of people who got this card who's not working at all. Well just a bit scared because i had  4 or 5 time the blue asus bios logo with weird colors. But having no prob in game. 

It was a pain to install driver because the 12.11 was not working. had to pass by the cd then switch to new beta. Well 13.1 are out today. 

Just a bit disgusted when i saw sapphire confirming they are doing one with 2 fan just a few days after i  ordered mine. Could  not wait more, i  switched from a cross 4770 and already waited when i saw the tahiti release.


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## Socram13 (Jan 16, 2013)

Nice review W1zzard!
Tahiti LE HD 7870 may have an appealing price, but like was told, Power consumption values are tremendous high when compared to the direct competitor, GTX 660 Ti or even HD 7950.
I´m curious to see Power consumption comparison when highly overclocked above 1200MHz.
If they called it HD 7930, would be more logical, but in the other hand, XX30 cards have always been victims of criticism along the history, aka, Lame Edition.


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## Yellow&Nerdy? (Jan 16, 2013)

Great review as always!
This card offers pretty good bang for the buck. Does anyone know if the Club3D, VTX3D and PowerColor variants have the same PCB and cooler?


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## W1zzard (Jan 16, 2013)

Yellow&Nerdy? said:


> Great review as always!
> This card offers pretty good bang for the buck. Does anyone know if the Club3D, VTX3D and PowerColor variants have the same PCB and cooler?



club3d and vtx are 100% identical expect for sticker/print on the cooler. they even use the same bios


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## Casecutter (Jan 16, 2013)

Delta6326 said:


> Great review W1zz love your work. You might as well just buy this if you where going to get a 7950. For me I would rather buy the 660 TI it's smaller, less power hungry and same speed.





W1zzard said:


> completely agree



Ah, Egg has the Myst is $240 -AR$20 shipping $3, while most GTX660Ti that are AIB customs (nicer than reference), but not the Über OC’s will range around $260-280 with rebates more often of $20.

While I appreciate the merits for size and power... are such things worth the 15% adder?   I mean a reference GTX660Ti is 10” vs. the Myst 10.5” big whoop.  While hard to compare a GTX660Ti reference card for it’s OC’n as I don’t remember many reviews for that design or many that did much in overclocking.

Perhaps the best GTX650Ti deal is the MSI N660TI-2GD5/OC, a comparable single fan cooler (utilizes just 2 H-P vs. Myst 3 H-P’s) that is $270 –AR$20 w/FS.  Can’t find any reviews for this humble model so can’t say how it might OC, while it’s almost an inch shorter at 9.64”.

If I'm dropping $270 then I'm going for the Sapphire 7950 3Gb 384-bit with Booost clock (100352-2L) for $10 more and not mess with a 192-Bit 2Gb card.  With it's dual fan and five H-P cooler it pretty well established for OC'n.


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## DarkOCean (Jan 17, 2013)

Dj-ElectriC said:


> Holy hot damn of overclocking batman!



Pretty much useless if 27% core oc and 12% mem oc = only 5,5% improvement.


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## eidairaman1 (Jan 17, 2013)

DarkOCean said:


> Pretty much useless if 27% core oc and 12% mem oc = only 5,5% improvement.



single game they tested with that, too many variables


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## DarkOCean (Jan 17, 2013)

eidairaman1 said:


> single game they tested with that, too many variables



Still, very strange oc behaviour also 





W1zzard said:


> i tested this 3 times and it is consistent. could be related to amd's boost technology


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## [Ion] (Jan 17, 2013)

It's possible that the power target kept throttling it back---for that reason, I have my PT at +20% on both cards.


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## Zen_ (Jan 17, 2013)

I just got the Powercolor version of this card and have been really happy with it so far, although I admit to being swayed by less thorough reviews (of the Powercolor card) on other sites that did not cover the horrible dual monitor power consumption. That may have changed my decision.


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## las (Jan 18, 2013)

OC seems great, but the scaling is really bad in BF3? This is a pretty GPU intensive game, so it should scale well with OC? Is this because of the gimped memory bandwidth compared to the real Tahiti cards?

Anyway.

*Can someone tell me what this card limits is in AMD Overdrive?* aka OC in AMD Control Center 

I would really like to know, since i won't be using 3rd party OC software.

Also. The Voltage is locked right? On Tahiti-LE cards.. I read that in some review.. But some ppl say its not locked?! 

Thanks!


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## W1zzard (Jan 18, 2013)

las said:


> Can someone tell me what this card limits is in AMD Overdrive? aka OC in AMD Control Center



on the temps & clock profiles page: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/VTX3D/Radeon_HD_7870_XT_Black/32.html


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## las (Jan 19, 2013)

W1zzard said:


> on the temps & clock profiles page: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/VTX3D/Radeon_HD_7870_XT_Black/32.html



Wtf.. Thats some high limits.. Have AMD opened up for proper OC?  Because i had 1125/1575 as max in Overdrive on my old 7970...


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## eidairaman1 (Jan 24, 2013)

if you want that card of yours to run further use Sapphire Trixx or Afterburner, Overdrive is just AMDs overclocker suite that controls the CPU and GPU via the AVECC


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## jamsbong (Mar 26, 2013)

Looking at the clock profile, the voltage looks very high especially on blu-ray mode. 1.2 volt!
And 1.29 on gaming???

The first thing you can do to reduce the enormous heat and power consumption would be to reduce the voltage. Anyone tried to manually rewrite these profiles so they are more like a 7950?

Despite this flaw, I think this is a great bargain!


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## creativeitservices (Apr 6, 2013)

*Tahiti LE Strange Behaviour*

Hi all, first post here

Anyway got the VTX3D 7870 Black for myself recently and must say I am very impressed but also a bit mystified by it. I have mine fitted with an Arctic Cooling Accellero Mono Plus + cooler. For anyone wondering the mounting holes on this card are the same as a 7850/7870 despite it being a Tahiti GPU. Here is my situation and I hope this might help explain the poor overclock scaling.

My card overclocks to 1165 without any artifacts in OCCT after 3 hours- I don't see any point in overclocking the memory on these as there is already sufficient bandwith- great right? But here is the thing, when I benchmark the card in Tomb Raider and 3DMark13 im getting LOWER scores then running the card @ stock speed!! Also the core temps are 10 degrees higher at stock speeds when Benchmarking. So what the hell is going on here? So I throttled back the clock to 1050 and same problem!! All the above was done with the power slider set at +20% . Its as if the card is shutting down shaders when overclocked because it cannot get enough power to run all of them.

So please if you have this card and you have overclocked it verify that your ovrclock is actually giving you higher frame rates. Unfortunately I still haven't found an app that can change the core voltage on this card so Overclocking is out of the question at the moment- great card at stock speed though.

One more issue I have found- with the latest ATI 13.3 Beta driver the card suffers from the Clock Drop seen on other Tahiti LE Cards. Even with the power slider set to +20% the card will slow down to 500MHZ on the core after gaming for a whilen


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## rodneyhchef (Apr 7, 2013)

Just got mine. Running the usual things like GPU-z on it. I notice mine reports it is running PCI-E x16 1.1 when the board is 2.0 I notice the same info is reported in your GPU-z screenshot Wizz

EDIT - when I run the render test the value goes up to 2.0 but when I close it it returns to 1.1


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## creativeitservices (Apr 7, 2013)

rodneyhchef said:


> Just got mine. Running the usual things like GPU-z on it. I notice mine reports it is running PCI-E x16 1.1 when the board is 2.0 I notice the same info is reported in your GPU-z screenshot Wizz
> 
> EDIT - when I run the render test the value goes up to 2.0 but when I close it it returns to 1.1



Strange, will check that out on my card- think I may have found the problem with my card, im using MSI Afterburner now instead of AMD Overdrive/ Sapphire Trixx and got higher scores clocked @ 1040- will keep pushing the clocks until it starts to have a negative effect on the scores


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## ChristTheGreat (Apr 7, 2013)

Delta6326 said:


> Great review W1zz love your work. You might as well just buy this if you where going to get a 7950. For me I would rather buy the 660 TI it's smaller, less power hungry and same speed.



Well, most people doesn't use their game 24/7, so I guess AMD zerocore is better...



Casecutter said:


> Ah, Egg has the Myst is $240 -AR$20 shipping $3, while most GTX660Ti that are AIB customs (nicer than reference), but not the Über OC’s will range around $260-280 with rebates more often of $20.
> 
> While I appreciate the merits for size and power... are such things worth the 15% adder?   I mean a reference GTX660Ti is 10” vs. the Myst 10.5” big whoop.  While hard to compare a GTX660Ti reference card for it’s OC’n as I don’t remember many reviews for that design or many that did much in overclocking.
> 
> ...





On my side, I did look to those Tahiti LE, but they were less cooled than my MSI TFIII. Another reason why I choosed the HD7950 over a Tahiti LE and nVidia card, was Crysis 3 + Bioshock Infinite as a game bundle.


By the way, thanks W1z for the review,


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## kmetek (Apr 12, 2013)

which one to choose, VTX3D // POWERCOLOR MYST // CLUB 3D?


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## DarkOCean (Apr 12, 2013)

kmetek said:


> which one to choose, VTX3D // POWERCOLOR MYST // CLUB 3D?



all tahiti le cards you mentioned are based on the same pcb with the same cooler(those that use one fan), so get the cheaper one.


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## kmetek (Apr 12, 2013)

thanks, will choose the one with never setlle reloaded


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## TRWOV (Apr 12, 2013)

rodneyhchef said:


> Just got mine. Running the usual things like GPU-z on it. I notice mine reports it is running PCI-E x16 1.1 when the board is 2.0 I notice the same info is reported in your GPU-z screenshot Wizz
> 
> EDIT - when I run the render test the value goes up to 2.0 but when I close it it returns to 1.1



That's a power saving feature. To keep 2.0 active all the time go into Power Options and select  High Performance (it might be hidden under "show more energy plans").


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