Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 XT (Tahiti LE) 2GB with Boost Overclocked Video Card Review

By: Shawn Baker (more) | Video Cards Content | Posted: Jan 23, 2013 6:01 am

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TweakTown Rating: 92% Manufacturer: Sapphire Tech

The Card

sapphire_radeon_hd_7870_xt_tahiti_le_2gb_with_boost_overclocked_video_card_review

Having a look at the video card the overall design isn't anything too out of the ordinary - we've seen this Dual-X cooler in the past. It's a pretty strong cooler, though, and you can see the massive heatsink in the background along with a number of heatpipes coming out the bottom to help pull heat away from the core.

Moving away from the front and taking a moment to move around, you can see we've got two 6-pin PCIe power connectors at the back. As we stay across the top and move closer to the front you can see a single CrossFire connector in the event that you want to throw two of these video cards together.

Finishing up with the I/O side of things we've got a single Dual-Link DVI connector, HDMI port and a pair of Mini DisplayPort connectors. You can also see the top half has a vent that goes from top to bottom to help hot air escape out the back of your case.

Specifications

Out of the box the Sapphire HD 7870 XT carries with it the default clock speeds that are associated with this new model. That means the core comes in at 975MHz on the core and 6000 MHz QDR on the 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Like we mentioned in the introduction, because we've already had a look at stock performance in a previous PowerColor review, we'll be overclocking today.

Firing up MSI Afterburner we took the time to see what we could do with overclocking. While normally we'd adjust the voltage, as you can see above, it wasn't an option here. Since the Tahiti LE isn't manufactured by everyone it's clear that companies aren't going to put as much effort into the overclocking software, especially someone like MSI who hasn't got a Tahiti LE based video card on sale yet themselves.

For some reason GPU-Z wouldn't show us the adjusted speeds when overclocked so for that reason we've used the MSI Afterburner image. As you can see above we pushed the core up to 1208MHz. For the 2GB of GDDR5, we left that at the default 6000MHz QDR, as whenever we adjusted the memory speed, the performance of the video card would drop back - so we left the memory clock at the default speed.