XFX HD7870 Black Edition Overclocked Graphics Card Review

In the last fortnight we have received many new graphics cards from AMD's partners. The XFX HD7870 Black Edition is another beautiful ‘supermodel' styled card set to reinforce their lineup.

The XFX dual fan cooler helps to reduce noise emissions over the reference solution, although we were slightly disappointed to see that the temperatures were no better than the reference cooled HD7870, even with the updated ‘retail' bios we were sent just before publication.

65c under gaming load is not a concern, but it is worth pointing out that Gigabyte's HD7870 Overclock Edition achieved a record breaking 48c load result, 17c cooler than this Black Edition. In this case three fans are certainly better than two. Furthermore, it doesn't help that the Gigabyte card is clocked 50mhz higher out of the box (1,100mhz), delivering extra frame rate performance.

While every sample will be different, it is clear the XFX HD7870 Black Edition has a lot of headroom available on the core. While they won't all hit 1,240mhz, we would assume that 1,100mhz-1,150mhz would be possible with all of these cards.

The XFX slogan has always been ‘play hard', but in this instance we feel ‘play safe' would be more apt as 50mhz doesn't seem like much of an overclock to us for such a renowned enthusiast brand name. Gigabyte have been able to crank their tri fan card to 1,100mhz without any effort, which will give them the edge in the benchmark tests.

The Gigabyte HD7870 Overclock Edition is the best HD7870 we have tested to date and is still our ‘must have' award winner. This XFX HD7870 Black Edition is a great card, but it just doesn't quite deserve our highest award. 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.

We don't have a retail price going to publication, but you can expect to pay a premium over a reference cooled HD7870, probably around £300 inc vat.

Pros:

• Looks are stunning.
• Great performance.
• cooler is quiet.

Cons:

• Outperformed by the Gigabyte HD7870 Overclock Edition.
• overclock is rather tame for XFX.
• temperatures aren't as impressive as we hoped.

Kitguru says: XFX needed to crank the speeds higher for this Black Edition and increase fan speed a little more to drop the temperatures.

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