Sapphire Radeon HD 7870

Sapphire HD 7870 Review

This year AMD blew us away with its HD 7900 series GPUs, each equipped with a 28nm Tahiti core. One month later AMD released the not as impressive Cape Verde core. This can be found in the HD 7700 series, which was targeted at the lower end of the GPU scale. Two months after the release of the 79xx series, AMD added the Pitcairn core to be paired up with the rest of the Northern Island GPUs. The Pitcairn core, as you probably know by now, can be found in the HD 7800 series cards. Like its older siblings the Pitcairn core uses AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. So what can you expect with the GCN architecture? Up to 20 compute units, or 1280 Stream processors, up to 153.6GB/s of memory bandwidth, 32 render back-ends, dual geometry engines, and a 9th generation tesselator. This means you can expect a 28nm process, PCI-E Gen 3 support, as well as both AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power technology. The HD 7800 series will also be capable of AMD Eyefinity 2.0 and AMD App Acceleration. AMD hopes that this will make the 7870 and 7850 powerful enough to make you want to upgrade from your 5870 and 5850, respectively.