Sapphire HD7870 W/ Boost (Tahiti LE) Review

Today we are taking our second look at a HD7870 Tahiti LE card, this time from Sapphire. Our previous experiences with the HD7870 Tahiti LE have been memorable but today we wanted to show something different. We push the Sapphire card to the limit and manually overclock two competing AMD and Nvidia based 'pre-overclocked' solutions from HIS and MSI. Is the new Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti LE good value for money? Our last graphics review showed the HD7870 Tahiti LE when slotted into the overall market, but we received a lot of feedback after that review. People wanted to know how the HD7870 Tahiti LE would directly compare against the high value Nvidia GTX660 and it's more expensive sibling, the full fat HD7950. All running on the latest Catalyst and Forceware drivers. The Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti LE solution is currently available for only £190 inc vat at Overclockers UK. Hitting the sweet spot of £200 is very appealing for many hard core gamers who have a limited budget. One of our favourite cards last year was the MSI GTX660 OC Edition with Twin Frozr cooler released in September 2012. This card has recently dropped in price from £190 to £175 inc vat ... it is heavily overclocked but we it will ramp it via MSI Afterburner software to around 1,110mhz. Is is wise to save the £15 over the HD7870 Tahiti LE and opt for the budget priced GTX660 OC Twin Frozr? We all know the HD7870 Tahiti LE is faster than the vanilla HD7870, that is a no-brainer. The question is how does it compare against one of the finest HD7950 cards on the market? We decided to use the deafeningly quiet HIS HD7950 IceQ which is supplied in a pre-overclocked state. We will overclock this card to the limit, close to 1,100mhz. This is the most expensive card on test, retailing for around the £240 mark. Is it worth waiting a while longer to save up the extra £50 for an overclocked HD7950? The Sapphire box showcases the 'army lass' that has featured on several of their boxes in recent months. She is locked and loaded, complete with wonder bra. The bundle is as good as we would expect from Sapphire. They include several video and power converters, as well as a user manual, HDMI cable and Crossfire connector. The Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti card is built around a bright blue PCB with twin fan cooling system. The cooler is black, and the copper heatpipes can be seen from an angled viewpoint. The rear I/O plate has the name 'Sapphire' cut into the metal. We would have preferred the card to be built on a matching black PCB, but this is just personal taste. The card is Crossfire capable in a 2 way configuration. There is a dual bios switch close by, which is handy. The Sapphire HD7870 takes power from two 6 pin PCIe connectors. The card features a single DVI port, a full sized HDMI port and two mini Displayports. This card is EyeFinity capable, as expected. Hot air will be expelled out the rear of the cooler which is always good to see. The twin fan cooler is formed around a copper base which runs into four thick 8mm heatpipes. These heatpipes run into two separate racks of aluminum fins on either side of the core. Sapphire have included dedicated cooling for the VRM's. The upper row of GDDR5 is cooled directly via the same plate that cools the core. This card is not based on the Pitcairn XT core, but a ‘cut down’ version of the more expensive Tahiti core. This HD7870 ‘Tahiti LE’ version we know is built from 4313M Transistors (like the 7900 series) and has an upgraded 1,536 shader count. The HD7950 has 1,792 shaders and the earlier HD7870 has 1,280 shaders. In this regard the new HD7870 edition slots firmly half way between the standard HD7870 and HD7950. There are also now 24 SIMD units, up from 20 on HD7870 and less than the HD7950 (which has 28). The ROP count has not changed from 32, although there are now 96 texture units, up from 80 on the HD7870 but still less than the 112 count on the HD7950. The core is clocked at 975mhz and the 2GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1,500mhz (6Gbps effective) connected via a 256bit memory interface. 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. For our review today we are using an overclocked, liquid cooled Core i7 3960X system. We are using the latest Catalyst 12.11 beta driver for the AMD cards, and the latest Nvidia 310.90 driver for the MSI GTX660 OC Edition. All of the cards are manually overclocked past their default states to their respective limits (detailed below). We have not yet adopted Windows 8 for these reviews, as the polls on our home page and Facebook page show it is extremely unpopular with our audience. We will address this again in a couple of months time when the new operating system has had time to mature. We managed to push the Sapphire HD7870 w/Boost to 1235mhz core and 1645mhz memory. Any higher and very minor artifacting would occur (analysed with software). Test System: Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.4ghz Graphics Card: Sapphire HD7870 W/Boost Tahiti LE (Catalyst 12.11 Beta) @ 1,235mhz core and 1,645mhz memory. Cooler: Antec 920 H20 Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30 Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme Power Supply: Seasonic Platinum 1,000W Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case Boot Drive: Patriot WildFire 120GB Secondary Drive: 1TB Samsung Monitors: Dell U3011. Comparison Cards: MSI GTX660 OC Edition (ref: 1033mhz core and 1500mhz memory) @ 1127mhz core and 1587mhz memory. HIS HD7950 IceQ (ref: 925mhz core and 1250mhz memory) @ 1083mhz core and 1463mhz memory. Software: Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit Unigine Heaven Benchmark 3DMark Vantage 3DMark 11 Fraps Professional Steam Client FurMark Games: Max Payne 3 (DX 11) Far Cry 2 (DX 10) Far Cry 3 (DX 11) Total War: Shogun 2 (DX 11) Dirt Showdown (DX 11) Sleeping Dogs (DX 11) Alien V Predator (DX 11) 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. The overclocked HIS HD7950 IceQ leads this test by around 4 frames per second. The GTX660 OC averages 69 frames per second. The Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti LE averages almost 76 frames per second, which is an incredible result for a £190 solution. 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. The overclocked Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti LE scores almost 30,000 points which is an excellent result, and around 3,000 points behind the overclocked HIS HD7950 IceQ. 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 HD7950 leads the way, scoring just under 8,800 points. The Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti LE scores great, over 8,000 points. 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 1920x1080 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. Alien V Predator is using a demanding Direct X 11 engine which can still task hardware, even though it is one of the older engines on test today. These results showcase great frame rate performance from the Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti LE, averaging 80 frames per second. The manually overclocked HD7950 is around 6 frames per second faster. 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 run the DX11 Graphics High 1080p benchmark, available for this game in STEAM. You can therefore directly compare against your own system. Frame rates are rounded up or down to the nearest digit. This game engine favours AMD hardware and the results gained from the Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti LE indicate very smooth overall performance, even at these demanding settings. 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: 2560×1600, 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). This engine has always favoured Nvidia hardware and we can see that the manually overclocked GTX660 OC claims the top performance spot in this test. The AMD cards are a little behind, although all solutions are perfectly playable at these settings. Far Cry 3 is an open world first-person shooter video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal in conjunction with Ubisoft Massive, Ubisoft Red Storm, Ubisoft Reflections, and Ubisoft Shanghai and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It is the sequel to 2008′s Far Cry 2. It has received a lot of acclaim from the public and is up for contention as Game of the Year via many publications. We configured this game to run with extremely high image quality settings, as shown above. This is demanding game which needs capable partnering hardware. All solutions are playable, although the manually overclocked HD7950 is the clear leader. Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007. We configured the game at the ULTRA preset with a 1080p resolution and 8x MSAA. This game tends to favour AMD hardware and the results are very positive for the Sapphire HD7870 LE, averaging 68 frames per second. Sleeping Dogs started development as an original title, but was announced in 2009 as True Crime: Hong Kong, the third installment and a reboot of the True Crime series. As a result of the game’s high development budget and delays, it was canceled by Activision Blizzard in 2011. Six months later, it was announced that Square Enix had picked up the publishing rights to the game, but the game was renamed Sleeping Dogs in 2012 since Square Enix did not purchase the True Crime name rights. We are using the highest possible image quality settings at 1080p, including the high resolution texture pack. This game is very demanding at these settings, as the results show. That said the Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti LE is playable after we overclocked it manually, averaging 36 frames per second. Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter in which the player assumes the role of its titular character, Max Payne. Max Payne 3 features a similar over-the-shoulder camera as its predecessors, with the addition of a cover mechanic, while also retaining much of the same run-and-gun style of gameplay. Max Payne 3 also marks the return of bullet-time in action sequences, for which the franchise is notable. In bullet-time it is possible to see every bullet strike an enemy in detail. New to the series is a “Last Stand” mechanic, which gives the player a grace period after losing all health during which time the player may kill the enemy that wounded them in order to continue playing, however this mechanic is only usable if the player has one or more bottles of painkillers in their possession. We used the image quality settings, highlighted above. Total video memory demand was 1270MB from all cards. Performance from this engine was good, and perfectly smooth throughout, averaging 48 frames per second. 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 HD7870 cooler is excellent, peaking around 62c when gaming. This rises to 66c under synthetic load. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost 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 dual fan cooler is very quiet, and even under gaming load doesn't emit very much noise. 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 2 and record the results. The Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti LE demands around 170 watts at the socket when gaming. The Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti LE graphics card is a very attractive proposition for gamers who are limited to a budget of around £200. It is without doubt one of the best value for money graphics cards currently on the market. At around £190 inc vat the Sapphire solution is certainly worth serious consideration. Our testing has shown that at the highest overclocked speeds the Tahiti LE can deliver reference HD7950 performance although it won't compete directly against the leading HD7950 cards on the market when they are also manually overclocked to the limit. The HIS HD7950 IceQ for instance always held a clear frame rate advantage over the HD7870 Tahiti LE core, although it isn't such a clear cut buying decision when you factor in the considerable £50 price difference. The MSI GTX660 OC was one of my favourite graphics cards in 2012 and with the recent price drop to around £175 inc vat it maintains a great price to performance ratio, especially when factoring in that the custom Nvidia 660ti cards are around £60-£70 more expensive. In this test today however the MSI GTX660 OC was clearly outperformed by the Sapphire HD7870 Tahiti LE solution. The Sapphire graphics card not only delivers excellent frame rate performance, the power demand is also lower than the HD7950. The dual fan cooler ensures that noise emissions are never a concern, even under extended load. The copper heatpipe based cooling system holds extended load temperatures in the mid 60's (C). We can certainly recommend the Sapphire HD7870 w/Boost (Tahiti LE). The price point breaks new ground for those gamers who are struggling to get acceptable frame rates at 1080p with the latest Direct X 11 titles. It is one of the finest graphics cards under the £200 mark. Pros: Best performance under £200. runs quiet. runs cool. massive overclocking headroom. lower power demand than full fat HD7950. strong bundle. Cons: No shortage of competition. Kitguru says: A high performance card at a very tempting price point, ideal for 1080p gaming with the latest Direct X 11 titles.