HIS Radeon 7870 ICEQ Turbo review - Introduction

The good people from AMD recently released two new products, the Radeon HD 7850 and 7870. The board partners are very savvy to release  products based on these cute products as they perform well, quite well actually.

Two graphics cards have been released in the 7800 series, Pitcairn XT (GPU codename) is the AMD Radeon HD HD7870 - it will have 20 Compute Units carrying 1280 Stream Processors, 80 texture units and 32 ROPs. core and memory frequencies will clock in at an impressive 1000 MHz on the GPU and 1200MHz (4800MHz effective GDDR5) on the memory, this product is equipped with 2GB memory running over a 256-bit memory interface. AMD brands this product the "One GHz Edition" due to the reference clock frequency. This means that AMD's partners can release products clocked even higher.

Pitcairn Pro is what you'll learn to know as the Radeon HD 7850, it features 16 Compute Units, 1024 Stream (shader) Processors, 64 texture units and 32 ROPs. Its core and memory frequencies fall behind that of the 7870 but it is still clocked at a good 860 MHz core with 1.20GHz (4800 MHz effective) on the memory. The 7850 tested has 2GB of graphics memory, but for this model we expect to see both 2GB and 1GB memory variants in the stores. Again, the memory is based on a 256-bit interface.

The 7870 cards are still hard to get but have an expected MSRP of $349 USD, whereas the 7850 will be available for $249 (2GB). Typically prices in EUR would be slightly lower.

Our friends from HIS technology released their Radeon HD 7800 series with both a Radeon HD 7870 model and an HD 7850. HIS also implemented ICEQ cooling solutions. Next to that there are also TURBO edition.

So the Radeon HD 7870 ICEQ TURBO edition as we test today makes use of a customized PCB and comes with a new model ICEQ cooler, The card also has a 10% stock overclock with the graphics processor running at a cool 1100 MHz.

Head on over to the next page where we'll meet and greet Pitcairn, aka the Radeon HD 7800 series, and specifically the HIS Radeon HD 7870  ICEQ TURBO, it's quite something to look at really.