The Card

Having a look at the card the overall cooler design isn't anything too exciting with a black shroud covering most of the card. Looking at it, though, you can see under the center fan a big aluminum heatsink with a couple of heatpipes coming out the top.

As we take a look around you can see we've got two 6-pin PCIe power connectors which is the same as the standard GHz Edition of the HD 7870. Closer to the front you can see we've got a single CrossFire connector in the event you want to add a second card into the mix.

Moving to the I/O department you can see on the left we've got two Mini-DP connectors, one HDMI connector and a Dual Link DVI connector to round off the connectivity side of things. You can see the top half of the I/O plate is a vent that's going to assist in getting the hot air out the back of the case.

Specifications

Like we mentioned in the introduction the main thing to remember about the Tahiti chip is that it's the one used on the HD 7900 series cards and not the HD 7800 series. So while it carries the "LE" tag at the end of it, specifications wise it looks impressive against the Pitcairn XT chip which the HD 7870 GHz Edition uses.

The standard HD 7870 and this Myst Edition share some similarities like 28nm core and 256-bit memory bus, the main difference between the two cards is the Unified Shaders. The original HD 7870 GHz Edition came with 1280 while this Tahiti LE based model offers 1536.

While the clock speeds are down with 975MHz being seen here via boost compared to the 1200MHz via Boost on the GHz Edition card, the extra shaders are going to make a huge difference. Along with that we've also got a 6000MHz QDR memory clock instead of 4800MHz QDR.