AMD HD7870 and HD7850 Graphics Card Review

We can't detail any bundle or accessories with our launch review. Our review cards are engineering samples which came direct from AMD HQ.

This reference sample is built around a black PCB and features the traditional AMD black and red cooler. A small fan is offset to the right of the front of the plastic shroud.

The AMD HD7850 is Crossfire capable, but only in a 2 way configuration. If you want three or four way Crossfire, you have to invest more money in a HD7950 or HD7970.

The HD7850 takes power from a single PCI E 6 pin port on the card. The HD7850 and HD7870 share the same cooler, so there is a ‘hole' for another 6 pin power connector. This is used on the more powerful card which we will detail shortly.

The card is a dual slot design with a full sized DVI and HDMI port, and two mini Display Port connectors. It is Eyefinity capable. This card can simultaneously output multiple, independent audio streams from the HDMI and mini Displayport connectors at the rear of the card.

The AMD cooler is enclosed within the plastic shroud and is based around a copper heatsink which attaches directly to the GPU core.

A basic overview of the hardware which we discussed on the previous page. The Pitcairn GPU is manufactured on 28nm technology and this specific card features 32 ROPS and 2GB of GDDR5 memory which is connected via a 256 bit memory interface. The core clock is set at 860mhz and the memory 1,200mhz (4.8Gbps effective). The card has 1,024 shaders with a texture fillrate of 55 GTexel/s.

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