Gigabyte HD7870 Overclock Review (Windforce 3X)

Our review sample didn't ship in a retail box, but Gigabyte sent us over official artwork as shown above. They seem to be focusing on a neon style ‘eye' for the front image, which is unusual but surprisingly effective.

Gigabyte include a driver disc, Crossfire connector a quick installation guide, and a power converter cable.

The Gigabyte HD7870 Overclock Edition is built around a blue PCB, and the massive 3 fan cooler is longer than the PCB underneath. The fans look black from a distance, but they semi transparent. The cooler is all made from durable plastic. Our reference card was built around a black PCB.

The card is Crossfire capable in 2 way configurations. If you want 3 or 4 way Crossfire you need to budget for a 79xx series card.

The card is a dual slot design with a full sized DVI and HDMI port and two mini DisplayPort 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 Gigabyte board adheres to the reference AMD specifications, requiring two 6 pin PCI E power connectors.

The cooler is formed around two very thick copper heatpipes which run along the length of the card as shown above, into aluminum fins on either side of the copper base. The board uses 2GB of Hynix GDDR5 memory.

A basic overview of the hardware which we discussed earlier in the review. 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 increased from 1,000mhz to 1,100mhz and the memory 1,200mhz (4.8Gbps effective). The card has 1,280 shaders.

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