Gadgetory

welcome to my much-delayed unboxing of the Radeon HD 7870 from XFX this is their core Edition card but even though it's a core or like a more basic Edition card I guess compared to their double D card which has two cooling fans this is still a gigahertz Edition card so the GPU itself is clocked at one gigahertz so this is not based on the same GPU as the 7950 in the 7970 which are using a larger die a more complicated chip to produce this is using the Pitcairn core which is the same one as is in the 7870 as well as the 7850 my performance wise the 7870 falls just in the range of a GTX 570 or 580 usually falling in between those two cards from the competition but because this is manufactured on a more advanced process it is able to achieve that performance with less power consumption as well as a lower price so let's see what XFX includes with their particular card here a crossfire bridge that's a standard length one however if your motherboard requires a longer one they usually come with them they do not disturb I'm gaming door hanger I have their old one from back when XFX was Nvidia exclusive over there on my door I've also got a driver DVD download the latest off the AMD website limited warranty terms for full details please refer to support central so they actually don't include that in the documentation they just want you to go online and check it out that's sort of smart quick install guide install guide for the drivers pro series power supply brochure for their power supplies as well some other great XFX products another brochure okay so that's pretty much all the information we need let's have a look at the XFX Radeon 7870 itself now these have been in in a bit of a production shortfall for the most part since they were released but what that should tell you about them is that they deliver a very compelling price to performance ratio and also you just take the software and also that people are demanding these cards so let's have a closer look at this particular card XFX does such a good job of the aesthetics and the overall look of their GPUs but let's dig a little bit deeper and find out how well design this is check this out so this is a very beefy cooler considering that even though this is a an enthusiast class of card this is still not the highest end GPU which you find on the 7950 in the 7970 so they've put an aluminum yunus ink across almost the entire card itself which is making contact with key components that do need to be cooled while staying well elevated over other components that don't need to be cooled so you can see there's gaps in it here here down in there I hope you can see that where you can see right through to the PCB which is giving you airflow over the components that don't need to be directly contacted by the Unison and in providing extra cooling to those that do so that's a very neat design choice I actually haven't seen that before it then uses an aluminum shroud which has like a brushed look as well as some sort of chrome looking accents with their ghost thermal technology slogan on here as well as the XFX logo here we've got a standard ish I guess it's getting standard these days although it's still not on many reference cards but an 80 millimeter fan in the middle we've also got four heat pipes that are carrying heat away from the GPU itself can you see those okay away from the GPU itself you'll be able to see them better from the top and then out to two aluminum FINRA's on either side of the fan itself so that is how the GPU is getting cooled they yeah like I said they're so good at this check this out so we've got another metal brushed piece which is Radeon red is it AMD red I mean AMD's colours never been read but they're still using the ATI red on the graphics cards which looks absolutely fantastic power for this card is provided by two PCIe 6 pin power adapters and it supports up to two way crossfire so AMD has removed the option for multi way crossfire configurations from this card it makes sense because honestly if you're buying three so to step-down GPUs you should probably just be buying one or two higher end ones instead because it's going to yield better performance do - the way that crossfire and actually SLI technology both inherently scale now in terms of output options this is a two gigabyte graphics card which means that it is more than capable of driving slightly older games and by older I don't mean like three four years old I mean like sort of last year six months ago like current generation as well as older games at extremely high resolution so having that extra graphics memory makes all the difference in the world because you have to load all the textures into the memory so even if you have a high performance card that's maybe from the competition say like a gtx 570 with only one point two gigs of memory the 7870 will absolutely rock it as soon as you start to increase the resolution beyond a single monitor so what that means is that this monitor or this card not only supports up to four displays out concurrently using 2d vis a DVI and HDMI or DVI and HDMI and then the two display ports but it can actually drive games as long as you're not GPU bound it has enough memory to hold all the textures necessary that you don't end up crippling the performance this is a pcie 3.0 16 X card so that rounds out it's sort of current to future generation technology so that means with your new Hydra bridge system or your sandy bridge-e system you will be able to take advantage of all of that bandwidth although it's quite debatable whether or not that's going to make any performance difference whatsoever so basically good pricing good performance and really the reason I'm doing this unboxing is because I really needed one so that I could test it against the upcoming GTX all wait I should probably shouldn't say so that I can release this video right away thanks for checking out this video don't forget to subscribe to honest tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer video