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[Hardware Review] General: The Sapphire AMD 7870 HD Review
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
One of the most important pieces of hardware for any gamer is the vaunted video card. In our latest hardware review, we take a look at the Sapphire AMD 7870 HD and give you our verdict. See if you agree before heading to the comments.
Today we're going to take a look at the Radeon HD 7870 OC Edition provided to us by Sapphire to MMORPG. I'm going to give you a general overview of the card, a few FPS stats from runs I conducted with Tera, Planetside 2, and Mechwarrior, and my final opinion on if this piece of hardware is worth looking at when you are deciding on a new video card for your system. So we’re not going to get too technical, but you should get a good idea on what you're getting when you purchase Sapphire’s OC version of the AMD 7870HD.
Read more of Arden Bartlett's The Sapphire AMD 7870 HD Review.
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Comments
just bought a new computer with this card. Did the ffxiv benchmark on higest settings on everything ran great and should have no problems with ffxiv..
bobm111
Agreed, once the next gen consoles come out we are going to see a lot of hardware taxing games. That's why I'm working on getting myself a new computer this year. My 560ti just ain't cutting it anymore.
This is why you can't review one video card in isolation and expect meaningful results. The proper question is not just how does this card perform, but how does it perform relative to the competition at the same settings.
It's also not clear what "everything turned to 11" means. Does that mean you turned on 8x SSAA in Catalyst Control Center? Set some main in-game slider to maximum without looking at detailed settings? Good reviews usually give a lot more detail than that--and in particular, make sure that they mention the driver version used.
I also rather doubt that the memory was running at 12000 MHz. 1.2 GHz is the stock speed for a Radeon HD 7870.
He did mention that the games are running at 1080. Also while his phrasing of turn up to 11 may not be accurate I would presume it means set in game to max detail. As for his frame rates, look at the system used, a Phenom II 945 is not exactly a higher speed chip.
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I have a soap box and I am not afraid to use it.
I'm a little confused.. why is an older card getting a review?
The 7970 been out for longer than a year, is dropping to affordable prices, and the new(but vastly overpriced) 7990 is out...
Why the writeup on a card that has to be at least 3 years old now?
Hmm ok i take that back, the two are less than 1 month apart from each other... confusing...
its not 7970 and 7870 launched at the same time.
Sapphire provided MMORPG a card. Nice
You guys do a little write up on it. Nice
Too bad it has absolutely no technical relevance.
Granted, MMORPG doesn't necessarily have the experience or the depth to do a technically relevant review: you have one card, in isolation, and you can't really do much with it except play a few games and say "Yup, they work fine".
However, if you wanted to start a basis for relevence, you'd leave out all the "It plays great" subjective comments; because those are exactly that: subjective. You list out all the facts: This is the driver we used. These are the game settings we used. This is the other hardware in the computer. These are the results we got.
Leave it to the reader to draw conclusions as to if it's great or not - one person may think 30FPS average is fine, another may scoff at anything less than a solid 60FPS minimum.
And then, when you get that next toy to review, you have a valid basis for comparison, not just some subjective junk that almost reads like a shill-piece.
There aren't any non-GHz Edition 7870s. Putting "GHz Edition" on the end is just a stupid name that the marketing department came up with. It was basically a way of saying, "We have cards with a stock clock speed of 1 GHz and Nvidia doesn't". This was basically because AMD launched cards on TSMC's 28 nm process node first; some Nvidia cards on the same process node also had a stock clock speed of 1 GHz or better. But you shouldn't care about a GPU clock speed for its own sake, but only how the card performs.
The "GHz Edition" moniker is only meaningful for a Radeon HD 7970, which has both GHz Edition and non-GHz cards. I'd interpret that as AMD saying, "We meant for the 7970 to have a stock clock speed of 1 GHz, but yields weren't good enough." As the process node matured and yields improved, they eventually launched a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition based on the same die.
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Don't get too caught up in the different tiers of 80 PLUS certification. Better tiers only denote higher energy efficiency and nothing else. Some Platinum certified power supplies have excellent energy efficiency and are otherwise not very good--to the degree that I'd rather have, say, a Bronze-certified Corsair TX650 V2 with lesser energy efficiency but pretty good everything else.
Tech sites typically review the hardware that manufacturers are willing to send them for free.
There are two basic types of video card reviews. First is the launch day reviews, where AMD or Nvidia will send cards to a bunch of sites at once and say, you can't publish anything before this time on this day. Those reviews are mostly about how the new card performs relative to older cards, how much power it uses, and how much it costs.
Second is later reviews of a particular SKU of a card. That's what this review is. Sapphire or EVGA or Asus or whoever will send a particular card to various sites to review it. This uses the same GPU chip as the launch day reviews, so performance is largely known in advance, though sometimes newer video drivers or a factory overclock can improve performance somewhat.
Rather, later reviews of a video card are more about temperatures, noise, build quality, power consumption, and overclockability. There are a bunch of Radeon HD 7870s, for example, and at the same clock speeds, they'll all perform the same. But some will run hotter or noisier than others, and a review of a particular SKU can give some guidance on which are better than which others.
I think that the real reason that Sapphire sent a card in to be reviewed is hoping that someone will see a Sapphire version of a Radeon HD 7870 and think it's a good card and buy it not realizing that you could get a HIS or MSI or Gigabyte version of a 7870 that performs exactly the same--and might happen to be cheaper that day. AMD doesn't care which brand you buy (so long as it's AMD rather than Nvidia), but Sapphire, XFX, and so forth sure do.
Unfortunately, this site doesn't have anyone on staff with the hardware knowledge and experience to do a worthwhile review. From Sapphire's perspective, that might be fine; sending cards out for review is a marketing expense to them. But from the perspective of a reader who wants to know what video card to buy, there are better reviews out there. There are a lot of sites that will run a bunch of different cards through various benchmarks and let you compare them. Hard OCP and Tech Report have unique methods that give you useful data that other sites just getting benchmark numbers tend not to, but you have to know how to read the data they're giving you.
perfomance is a good and important thing, but if you add drivers software too?
ATI or NVIDIA makes you ''feel'' more comfortable?
This^
I'm waiting to see what happens with this:-
http://developer.amd.com/resources/heterogeneous-computing/what-is-heterogeneous-system-architecture-hsa/
From what I read the Playstion 4 is using this technology and when it comes to gaming PC's they are going to be cheaper and very fast for gaming compared to the tech we have today.
So I will wait a year and see what happens before I upgrade.
Lol. I was about to write this.
yup me too
Most memorable games: AoC(Tryanny PvP), RIFT, GW, GW2, Ragnarok Online, Aion, FFXI, FFXIV, Secret World, League of Legends (Silver II rank)
Pretty fuckin' late... review.
I picked up a HIS 7870 on black friday 2012 for $190 on newegg.
I've really been enjoying this card.
Quizzical helped me decide which video card to buy