Introduction

Last 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 MSI Radeon HD 7870 HAWK is the MSI Lightning's smaller brother. It uses the company's signature Twin Frozr II dual-fan cooler. MSI has also increased the clock speeds of the HD 7870 HAWK to 1100 MHz GPU and 1200 MHz memory.