AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB
The HD 7870 2GB is another AMD card that’s
greatly benefitted from recent price cuts and driver updates. Launching at around
$386, it now finds itself on the wallet-friendly side of $321.5 and competing
with Nvidia’s GTX 660 2GB. This has, in the past, been the bang per-bukc sweet
spot, with earlier cards such as the GTX 560 Ti 1Gb and HD 5850 1GB offering
great value.
Based on AMD’s Pitcairn XT PU, the HD 7870
2GB shares the same dual front-end as the HD 7900 series of cards. Its reduced
stream processor count allows for a smaller 212mm2 die and a 2.8
billion transistor-count. With 12 of the Southern Islands architecture’s
maximum of 32 compute units disabled, the HD 7870 2GB’s 20 remaining CUs boast
80 SIMD engines, for a total of 1,280 stream processors and 80 texture units.
The GPU runs at mighty 1GHz core frequency though; higher than that of the 7950
3GB and the stock HD 7970 3GB. As much, in front-end heavy tasks such as
tessellation, the HD 7870 2GB is faster.
While it retains 32 ROPs, two of the four
64-bit memory controllers have been disabled, leaving a 256-bit memory
interface. With a 1.2GHz (4.8GHz effective) memory frequency, this results in a
peak memory bandwidth of 153.6GB/sec
With its high core frequency, the HD 7870
2GB handles Unigine heaven’s tessellation heavy benchmark well, with its score
of 1,306 marginally eclipsing that of the competing GTX 660 2GB. The two cards
were also extremely well matched throughout our benchmark suite. The GTX 660
2GB has an advantage in Skyrim at 1,920 x 1,080 with 8x AA, thanks to a minimum
frame rate of 61fps compared to the HD 7870 2GB’s 56fps. In The Witcher 2 at
1,920 x 1,080, the HD 7870 2GB leads the way with a minimum frame rate of 48fps
compared to the Nvidia card’s 46fps.
At higher resolutions, there’s little to
separate the two cards across all our benchmarks, with both returning
near-identical minimum frame rates at 1,560 x 1,600. The HD 7870 2GB has a
slight advantage when it comes to power efficiency, though, pulling a peak
system power of 192W compared to the GTX 660 2GB’s power draw of 205W.
Conclusion
The HD 7870 2GB and GTX 660 2GB are very
evenly matched, which is reflected in their similar pricing. Across our range
of benchmarks it’s hard to separate them by any significant margin, although
we’d hesitate to recommend them for high-resolution use; the ideal resolution
for both is 1,920 x 1,080. As the GTX 660 2GB is available for a marginally
lower price, it just pips the HD 7870 2GB, but the Radeon remains extremely
competitive and is good value for money.
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Information
Similar to the GTX 660 2GB, but
marginally more expensive
Gigahertz: Slightly quicker than a GTX
660 2GB at 1,920 x 1,080; low power consumption
Giga-Hurts: Dearer than the GTX 660 2GB
Typical street price: $299
Manufacturer: www.amd.com
Scores
1920 speed: 13/20
2560 speed: 12/20
5760 speed: 2/5
Value: 45/55
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