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.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• PCI-E power cable
• Mini-DP to DP Adapter
• DVI Adapter

The Card

MSI is using a shrinked down version of the TwinFrozr IV cooler from the MSI Lightning on their card.


The card requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one full size HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPorts. You may use all the outputs at the same time, thanks to AMD's display output architecture.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU, too. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes HD audio and support for Blu-ray 3D movies. The DisplayPort outputs are version 1.2 which enables the use of hubs and Multi-Stream transport.


You may combine up to two HD 7850 cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration for higher framerates or better image quality settings.


Pictured above are photos of 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.