PowerColor's Radeon HD 7870 Devil is the latest in the company's arsenal of graphics cards. Unlike other HD 7870 cards released not too long ago, this one is not based on the "Tahiti LE" graphics processor, yet provides similar performance at much lower power consumption. Being overclocked out of the box, we see an 8% performance improvement over the reference design HD 7870. The HD 7870 is a good, affordable card for 1080p gaming with decent settings—only with the most demanding titles, like Crysis 3, should you reduce settings a bit for higher framerates.
Power consumption of the card is significantly higher than the AMD HD 7870 reference board but not as high as Tahiti LE based cards. We see roughly the same gaming power consumption as the GTX 660 Ti and GTX 760, but non-gaming power levels of NVIDIA cards are much better. Especially the PowerColor HD 7870 Devil's high multi-monitor power consumption worries me as it could affect users who focus on productivity, using multiple monitors.
The card's big triple fan cooler leaves a good impression, especially visually, even though its color theme does look a bit ASUS ROG inspired, which doesn't have to be a bad thing. Temperatures are perfectly fine, but fan noise could in my opinion be a bit lower. While the card is certainly not noisy, other cards, especially custom boards on NVIDIA's side, offer much better noise levels for a similar price, performance, and power draw. The HD 7870 Devil has plenty of temperature headroom, so you could always adjust its settings manually.
Overclocking of our sample worked well and reached clocks typical for a HD 7870. Memory overclocking was a bit lower because the installed Elpida chips do not clock as well as chips from Samsung or Hynix. PowerColor chose a great voltage controller from CHiL. Its software voltage control and monitoring functions work with most overclocking software, including PowerColor's own.
With a price of $240, the card is certainly not cheap when compared to other HD 7870s starting at around $210. NVIDIA's GTX 660 Ti and GTX 760 clock in at around $250, offering much better gaming performance (+15%) for similar power consumption levels at often less noise with a custom design. However, NVIDIA cards do not include the fantastic AMD Never Settle game bundle which provides a nice selection of games to pick from after you've been out of the loop for a while.