Sapphire HD7870 FleX Edition Review

Sapphire's big bosomed 3D rendered army lass makes another appearance on the box, this time kitted out with wonder bra and SMG. A deadly combination.

The bundle includes several video and power converter cables, a Crossfire connector, software disc and literature on the full range of Sapphire products.

The Sapphire HD7870 FleX looks very similar to the HD7950 Flex. The ominous black cooler resides on a blue PCB with thick copper heatpipes clearly visible from various angles.

There are however some subtle changes. Firstly the product sticker is along the top edge of the black plastic cooler. There is also no ‘Dual X' sticker on this card, even though the fans appear identical.

Unlike the HD7950 FleX, this card is only Crossfire capable in a 2 way configuration. This is one of the ‘bonuses' of buying a HD79xx series video card.

The Sapphire HD7870 FleX Edition demands power from two 6 pin PCI Power connections, identical to the more expensive HD7950 model.

This is a dual slot design with two DVI connectors and a single full sized HDMI and DisplayPort. It is Eyefinity capable and can power up to 6 displays. This solution can simultaneously output multiple, independent audio streams from the HDMI and mini Displayport connectors at the rear of the card. The GPU can support 3GHz HDMI with frame packing support for Stereo 3D.

This FleX Edition card has a cooling plate positioned across the VRM's and memory modules. The cooler is not identical to the model we found on the HD7950 FleX, which had five thick copper heatpipes. The HD7870 FleX has four thick copper heatpipes which run into two separate racks of aluminum fins on either side of the core. As before, the engineering quality is first rate, with the two fans merging into a single header.

Above, a CPUZ overview of the hardware. The Pitcairn core is built around the 28nm engineering process, with a core clock increase to 1,050mhz. The 2GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a 256 bit memory interface. The card is equipped with 32 ROPs and 1,280 Unified shaders, down from 1,792 on the Sapphire HD7950 FleX Edition.

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