Introduction

AMD's recently released HD 7800 Series is based on the company's new Pitcairn silicon which uses the GCN shader architecture on a 28 nm process. HD 7850 provides great midrange capabilities beating the Radeon HD 6950 and the NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti.



MSI's Radeon HD 7870 Power Edition introduces the Twin Frozr IV cooler concept to a midrange card. It was introduced with the MSI HD 7970 Lightning, so expectations are high. In terms of clocks we see a slight 90 MHz overclock on GPU, memory has remained the same. Pricing is up by 20 bucks, so $270 will get you the MSI HD 7870 Power Edition.