ASUS Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2 GB

[Inceptor]

It's the same thing in all reviews. The only potential bottleneck is ROP's, but I find that unlikely. There has to be something at work in the 79xx cards that makes them so much less efficient than Pitcairn...

Has to be drivers, producing a gpu with a hardware bottleneck is a huge huge huge mistake for the engineers; I can't see that kind of mistake being made, by any engineer, regardless of company.

 

[Super XP]

7970 isn't bottleneck-ed by Rops because there is no game out there which can use 70% rops of the 7970

This is a driver issue.

Anyhow, this review among many others says if you have the HD 6970, then no need to upgrade to the HD 7870. They are practically identical in performance with the HD 7870 being slightly more efficient and OC's much better.

 

[m1dg3t]

Another great review W1zz! This look's like a pretty good option aside from it being an Asus product

 

[General Lee]

Nice OC for this sample. They should add the ASIC quality value in the OC section. Also higher clocks isn't the biggest reason for higher power consumption, it's the higher stock voltage this card has. Some might say it's included but those are two different things.

7900 is simply inefficient in gaming workloads. Games don't take use of the insane memory bandwidth or the shader grunt 7970 has. The only few games that take use of this is Crysis that's quite ROP heavy, which in turn utilizes the available bandwidth. 7970 simply needs higher clocks to make use of its resources.

 

[N3M3515]

Nice OC for this sample. They should add the ASIC quality value in the OC section. Also higher clocks isn't the biggest reason for higher power consumption, it's the higher stock voltage this card has. Some might say it's included but those are two different things.

7900 is simply inefficient in gaming workloads. Games don't take use of the insane memory bandwidth or the shader grunt 7970 has. The only few games that take use of this is Crysis that's quite ROP heavy, which in turn utilizes the available bandwidth. 7970 simply needs higher clocks to make use of its resources.

That, plus better drivers.

 

[pp965]

 

[W1zzard]

it's the higher stock voltage this card has

1.24V on DCII vs. 1.24V on ref. oh wait, same voltage

 

[Drash]

Just got a Sapphire 7870 OC edition, (1050/1250), thought what the heck, banged it straight to 1250/1450 ran FurMark, got an 11% improvement in score over 1050/1250. Seems like a result. Certainly a jump from the 4850 it replaced! Didn't run a long test but playing with the fan control it only gets noisy over 60% but its not got any where near that in the few hours Skyrim I've played. Was worried about price on these and had been thinking of waiting for a 670, but seen as it came as a birthday present don't think I can complain. Think the 680 stole a lot of thunder but the 7870 is a solid product.

 

[kensiko]

Hi guys,

just looking to buy a 7850. I thought the ASUS directCU line-up would be great, but after looking at this review, I'm not sure.

I would simply want a 7850 at stock with a big heat-sink so that it's silent. I don't want to take 90 more watts for a 5% performance increase!! So, is the ASUS really good at stock speed? Will it give the results from the HD7850 and 7870 review from AMD done in March?