The Card

Having a look at the video card we can see HIS has gone for a design which moves the fan to the middle instead of to the right hand side like we see out of the IceQ cooler. If we look a little closer we can see a pair of copper heatpipes that come out the middle where a large aluminum heatsink sits.

Taking a quick spin around you can see towards the back we've got two 6-pin PCIe power connectors while closer to the front you can see we've got a single CrossFire connector that allows us to run up to two of these cards together for added performance.

The I/O department finds a Dual-Link DVI port along with a full size HDMI port and two Mini DisplayPort connectors to round out the connectivity side of things. With the two Mini DP connectors it would've been nice to see at least one Mini DP to DP connector in the bundle, but there isn't. So in the event you want to make use of DisplayPort connectivity straight away, you'll no doubt want to look into buying an adapter.

Specifications

Out of the box the HIS HD 7870 GHz Edition card we've got on hand follows the reference clock speeds. That means the core comes in at 1000MHz as the "GHz Edition" name would suggest while the 2GB of GDDR5 carries a clock speed of 4800MHz QDR.

Because we've already looked at quite a few HD 7870s we figured today we'd look at the overclocking side of things on this model to see just what kind of performance we're able to get out of the card.

Looking above you can see we pushed the core up to 1170MHz while the 2GB of GDDR5 was pushed to 5400MHz QDR. This is a nice boost in clocks and we should see some nice performance gains.