Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition3. Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Synthetic: HQV Benchmark 2.09. Gaming: F1 201110. Gaming: HomeFront11. Gaming: Alien V Predator12. Gaming: Dead Island13. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 214. Gaming: Resident Evil 515. Gaming: Far Cry 216. Gaming: Total War Shogun 217. Technical: Thermal Dynamics18. Technical: Acoustics Performance19. Technical: Power Consumption20. Technical: Overclocking21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

Last week we reviewed the overclocked XFX HD7870 Black Edition graphics card, and today we look at the Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition. This card features a custom cooler, with twin fans and overclocked out of the box settings to appeal to the enthusiast audience.

Sapphire discrete video cards have scored well on Kitguru in recent months, and with good reason. Their coolers are the best on the market, even outperforming solutions from XFX. The combination of low noise levels and excellent cooling proficiency ensure class leading performance.

Product	AMD HD7970	AMD HD7950	Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition	AMD HD7850
Core Clock speed	925mhz	800mhz	1000mhz (1,050mhz)	860mhz
Transistors	4.31 billion	4.31 billion	2.8 billion	2.8 billion
Stream Processors	2,048	1,792	1,280	1,024
Compute Performance	3.79 TFLOPS	2.87 TFLOPS	2.56 TFLOPS	1.76 TFLOPS
Texture Units	128	112	80	64
Texture Fillrate	118.4 GT/s	89.6 GT/s	80 GT/s	55.0 GT/s
ROPs	32	32	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	29.6 GP/s	25.6 GP/s	32.0 GP/s	27.52 GP/s
Z/Stencil	128	128	128	128
Memory Type	3GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1,375mhz	1,250mhz	1,200mhz (1,250mhz)	1,200mhz
Memory Data Rate	5.5 GBps	5.0 Gbps	4.8 Gbps (5.0Gbps)	4.8 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	264 GB/s	240 GB/s	153.6 GB/s	153.6 GB/s

Sapphire have opted for the same modest overclock as XFX – that being 50mhz on the core, from 1,200mhz to 1,250mhz. The GDDR5 memory also receives a 50mhz clock increase to 1,250mhz (5.0Gbps effective). The Gigabyte HD7870 Overclock Edition that we reviewed a short while ago received a 100mhz overclock to 1,100mhz on the core, but didn’t have a memory boost at all.

The busty army lass features on this box, we have seen her a lot in recent months.

The bundle includes a Crossfire cable, software disc, video and power cables and literature on the product.

The Sapphire cooler is predominately black, with thick copper heatpipes visible from various angles. The card is built on a blue PCB.

The Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition is Crossfire capable but only in a 2 way configuration. Those people who want to adopt a 3 or 4 way Crossfire system need to budget for a 79xx series card.

The XFX HD7870 Overclock Edition features two 6 pin power connectors, which follows the reference guidelines.

The card is a dual slot design with two full sized DVI ports and a single HDMI port with 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 cooler features four thick copper heatpipes which lead into two separate racks of aluminum fins on either side of the core.

A basic overview of the hardware which we discussed earlier in the review. The Pitcairn GPU is manufactured on 28nm technology and this specific board 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 1,050mhz and the memory from 1,200mhz (4.8Gbps effective) to 1,250mhz (5.0Gbps effective). The card has 1,280 shaders.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.

To test today we are using our long standing Core i7 970 system, which is overclocked. We have a variety of hardware benchmarked on this system within the last couple of months which will make for an interesting market comparison.

Main Test System:
Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.6ghz
Graphics: Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Memory: 6GB ADATA @ 2133mhz 9-10-9-32
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)

Comparison Cards:
MSI R7970 Lightning Edition
HD7970
HD7950
HD7870
HD7850
HD6990 (880 core)
HD6970
HD6950
HD6870
Sapphire HD7770 1GHZ OC Edition
XFX HD7770 Black Edition S CFx
HD7770 CFx
HD7770
Sapphire HD7750 Ultimate Edition
HD6790
HD6770
HD6670
GTX590 SLi
GTX590
GTX580 SLi
GTX580
GTX570

Monitors: Dell U3011

Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:
HomeFront
Alien V Predator
Dead Island
Tom Clancy HAWX 2
Resident Evil 5
Far Cry 2
F1 2011
Total War: Shogun 2

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11.

Excellent performance, slotting in behind the HD7950 by only half a frame per second.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

Good results from the Direct X 10 based benchmark, scoring more than the AMD HD7700 1GHZ in Crossfire.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

The overclocked speeds help enhance the performance just past the HD7950, scoring 6861 points.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here

	Sapphire HD7870 OC
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	196

A score of 196 points is class leading right now, the ideal solution for high definition media playback on a big screen.

F1 2011 is the newest Direct X 11 racing game from industry pioneers CodeMasters. The 2011 Formula One season is the 62nd FIA Formula One season. The original calendar consisted of twenty rounds, including the inaugural running of the Indian Grand Prix before the cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Pirelli returns to the sport as tyre supplier for all teams, taking over from Bridgestone. Red Bull Racing are the reigning Constructor’s Champions. Red Bull Racing’s Sebastian Vettel is the defending Drivers’ Champion, one of five World Champions appearing on the grid.

Great performance results, equaling the HD7950 at 72 frames per second.

Homefront’s PC version was developed by Digital Extremes, a Canadian developer responsible for numerous Unreal Tournament games and Bioshock ports. It received mixed reports, although Kitguru really likes the single player aspect of this title. The engine isn’t the most demanding on the market, but it requires decent partnering hardware for solid frame rates at 1080p.

Strong results, averaging 63 frames per second at these high settings. Just a single frame slower than the HD7950.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparable throughout reviews.

A demanding Direct X 11 engine, although no performance concerns for the Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition, averaging 70 frames per second.

Dead Island is a first person horror action-adventure video game developed by Techland and published by Deep Silver for Microsoft Windows. It is centered on the challenge of survival on a zombie-infested open world island with a major emphasis on melee combat. It is rather good fun, for a short while, but it becomes repetitive.

The Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition manages to generate an extra three frames per second when compared against the reference card.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 is an arcade-style flight action game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft. After the events of the first game, the H.A.W.X squadron is sent to Middle East, where a high level of violence is being registered, and the appearance of various insurgents leaders in various hotspots. The team also has to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Russian nuclear weapons. The player will be controlling three groups: one American (Hunter), one British (Munro) and one Russian (Sokov), each with its own pilots and supporting characters. There will also be references to other characters in the Tom Clancy universe.

We are testing in full DX11 mode with all settings to maximum.

The Sapphire card managed to achieve 104 frames per second average at these settings, placing it behind the HD7950 by only a few frames per second.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

The discrete solution averages 148 frames per second, identical to the more expensive, reference clocked HD7950.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

The Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition averaged around 87 frames per second, identical performance to the AMD HD7770 CrossfireX system.

Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths.

We are using the built in benchmark which is available via the STEAM client for this game.

The overclocked HD7870 averaged 60 frames per second at 1080p, demanding settings for this Direct X 11 engine.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

The Sapphire cooler once again is the best we have tested to date, peaking around 57c under gaming load. Great results.

We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.

Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The Sapphire cooler is much improved when compared against the reference solution. When gaming it is basically inaudible, especially if inside a gaming oriented chassis.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and record the results.

In such an energy aware climate, AMD are making a big deal out of their new ‘ZeroCore Power’ technology. Many solutions today use power gating, clock gating and memory compression to reduce idle power requirements, but ZeroCore power technology can completely power down the core GPU while the rest of the system remains active.

The Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition demands around 144 watts when gaming, which is fairly efficient considering the performance levels.

For overclocking today we are using Catalyst Control Center.

We managed to push the core from 1,050mhz to 1,230mhz, and the memory from 1,250mhz to 1,450mhz. These are excellent overclocking results.

The manual overclock translates into a final score of 7,689 points which positions the card only a couple of hundred points behind the reference clocked HD7970. Very impressive.

We have reviewed many cards from AMD partners in recent weeks and the Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition is another excellent card targeting the demanding enthusiast audience. We don't think the Sapphire cards are quite as pretty as the XFX Black Edition models, but they perform at a similar level.

The Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition is more than a match for the XFX HD7870 Black Edition overall, with a slightly quieter cooling solution and improved temperature performance. Surprisingly, the biggest competition for both of these cards comes from an unusual corner in the shape of the Gigabyte HD7870 Overclock Edition, which hit our labs a few weeks ago and blew us away.

The temperatures from the Gigabyte card are better than either Sapphire or XFX solution, peaking at only 48c when gaming. Additionally, the Gigabyte solution has three large fans which certainly seem to work better than the dual fan coolers from either Sapphire or XFX. The Gigabyte HD7870 Overclock Edition is also supplied with the highest core clock speed of 1,100mhz, which means it performs better out of the box.

The Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition overclocked to 1,230mhz which is similar to competitor cards. Every modified HD7870 solution we have tested to date actually achieves over 1,200mhz, so there is clearly plenty of headroom with these boards.

We are slightly disappointed with the Sapphire clock speeds, 50mhz isn't that big a deal and Gigabyte had the right idea to push the card higher. This gives them the edge in benchmark results and ensures that the audience don't need to spend too much time tweaking the hardware more. Overclocking headroom on these cards will vary, but after reviewing many of them recently and factoring in a ‘safety margin', it appears that 1,100-1,150mhz is easily achievable without much effort.

The Gigabyte HD7870 Overclock Edition is still the best HD7870 we have tested to date and is still our ‘must have' award winner. The Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition is an excellent card, but it falls short of the Gigabyte version in several areas. Gigabyte have pushed the HD7870 sector forward in a positive direction since launch day, and it is now up to other companies to meet this grade.

Pros:

• Cooler is very quiet.
• Good overclocking headroom.
• we like the black cooler.

Cons:

• 50mhz increase could be more.
• Gigabyte 3 fan cooler performs the best.

Kitguru says: Another excellent graphics card from Sapphire, but Gigabyte win this round.

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