Club3D Radeon HD 7870 Joker review - Introduction

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 04/17/2013 01:43 PM [

Club3D Radeon HD 7870 (Tahiti LE) - the Joker card in the Poker series

A couple of months ago there was this rumor that a Radeon HD 7930 would be released, a slightly slower 7950. The dynamics have changed a bit as there are some selected SKUs on the market that use the Tahiti series GPU (R7900) in the R7800 series products. As such today we review the Club3D Radeon HD 7870 Joker, this is the much discussed 7870 card that in fact has a 7900 series GPU, what now is known as the Tahiti LE. For a fair amount of money this series 7800 product offers 7900 series performance. Armed with 2GB of graphics memory it hits a sweet spot gaming performance wise and to date it one of the more popular products in the mainstream segment. Let's check out the Club3D Radeon HD 7870 Joker card.

Now please do understand that the Joker 7870 is not a Radeon HD 7950. It might use the same chip, but you get less shader processors, less memory on a 256-bit memory bus. It's a weeeeird to explain product but look at the chart below and compare it back and forth, it will all fall into place then.

	Radeon HD 6970	Radeon HD 7850	Radeon HD 7870	Club3D HD 7870 joker	Radeon HD 7950	Radeon HD 7970
Shader Units	1536	1024	1280	1536	1792	2048
ROPs	32	32	32	32	32	32
Graphics Processor	Cayman	Pitcairn	Pitcairn	Tahiti LE	Tahiti Pro	Tahiti XT
Transistors	2640M	2800M	2800M	4310M	4310M	4310M
Memory Size	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	3072 MB	3072 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	384 bit	384 bit
Core Clock	880 MHz	860 MHz	1000 MHz	975 MHz	800 MHz	925 MHz
Memory Clock	1375 MHz	1200 MHz	1200 MHz	1500 MHz	1250 MHz	1375 MHz
MSRP	$380	$185	$245	$270	$310	$390

So yeah, what you are gonna see is that in some cases the R7870 Joker will sit at 7950 performance but realistically, it will often be in-between the R7870 and R7950, but for the money it's a mighty good position to be in. The prices mentioned above are MSRP, I just checked locally (Netherlands) and we spotted this card for as low as 205 EUR already (!).

Custom PCB, custom cooling and a faster factory clocked card series as it clocks in at 975 MHz, and that's a boost frequency. So this 7870 which really is a low segment R7980 in terms of tweakability, will not disappoint either as 1150 MHz is a target you can achieve without too much effort. And that brings this card in certain conditions close to the Radeon HD 7950 in terms of performance. We test the product with the hottest games like Crysis 3, BioShock, Tomb Raider, Battlefield 3, Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Hitman Absolution and many more.

Now you have seen the word 'Boost' a couple of times already, but what is up with that ? Well as you guys know AMD released the 7970 GHz edition, all of the sudden it came with turbo slash boost functionality. Basically depending on power load the GPU core clock frequency can clock up and down in a dynamic fashion. The function is not new and was introduced by NVIDIA on the series 600 cards, it's the very same principle really. That means that if your graphics card is allowed to use up-to 150 Watt the core frequency will be increased up-to a certain threshold until that 150 Watt margin has been reached, that means much more flexibility and where allowed, a little performance boost.

Now, the 28nm Tahiti GPU that powers this reference Radeon HD 7870 Joker card with its 1536 shader processors, is typically clocked at an 800 MHz reference base clock. On the Boost versions, two things changed, the boost functionality itself and the core is now allowed to boost to 995 MHz. Coming from 925; it's going to be interesting.

But lets head onwards into the review.

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Club3D Radeon HD 7870 Joker review
We test and review the Club3D Radeon HD 7870 Joker, this is the much discussed 7870 card that in fact has a 7900 series GPU, the Tahiti LE. For a fair amount of money this series 7800 product now offers 7900 series performance. Armed with 2GB of graphics memory it hits a sweet spot gaming performance wise and to date it one of the more popular products in the mainstream segment. Let's check out the Club3D Radeon HD 7870 Joker.

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