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.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• 2x PCI-E power cable
• DVI Adapter
• Mini-DP to DP Adapter
• 3x Voltage Measurement Cable

The Card

MSI's Twin Frozr cooler is a shrunk down version of the large heatsink we have seen on the MSI Lightning. While the blue stripe highlight looks certainly good, I have to admit that I liked the yellow on the MSI Lightning a bit better.
The blue blob on the back of the card is MSI's GPU Reactor, which provides voltage filtering. More on that later.


The card will occupy a bit more than two slots in your system. This is caused by the GPU reactor on the back, standing a bit off the PCB


Display connectivity options include a dual-link DVI port, one full-size HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPorts. You may use all the outputs at the same time.

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 7870 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.