ASUS Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II Review
7870 Done Right
It’s great to be a PC gamer these days. Gaming PC costs have fallen significantly over the past couple years largely in part due to the amount of performance AMD and Nvidia have been able to cram on their mid range graphics cards, and gaming bundles such as AMD’s Never Settle Reloaded bundles are making it easier than ever to obtain great graphics and some great games at prices unheard of many years ago.
Today we’ll be reviewing ASUS’s custom implementation of the Radeon HD 7870, the ASUS Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II (HD7870-DC2-2GD5-V2). The Radeon HD 7870 is a mid to high end graphics card, which features a 1GHz clock speed, 1280 stream processors, 80 TUs, 32 ROPs, and 2GB of GDDR5 running off a 256-bit memory bus.
As usual for most of ASUS’s recent graphics card lineup, we get their DirectCU II cooler, which has been ASUS’s go to custom graphics card cooler for a couple generations now. The cooler features a dual fan design, which is advertised to provide 20% better cooling with significantly less noise than the stock design. In addition to the DirectCU II cooler, ASUS has also custom designed the PCB as well, souping up the power delivery system by incorporating a digital VRM design based off DIGI+ VRM along with super alloy capacitors, mosfets, chokes, and much more.
Intrigued? Let’s flip the page and take a closer look.
Specifications
| AMD Radeon HD 7850 | AMD Radeon HD 7870 | ASUS HD 7870 DirectCU II (HD7870-DC2-2GD5-V2) |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Fabrication | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm |
| Core Clock | 860MHz | 1000MHz | 1000MHz |
| Stream Processors | 1024 | 1280 | 1280 |
| Texture Units | 64 | 80 | 80 |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| Buffer Size | 2GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Interface | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Frequency | 1125MHz (4.5 GHz Effective) | 1200MHz (4.8GHz Effective) | 1200MHz (4.8 GHz Effective) |
| Additional Features | N/A | N/A | DirectCU II DIGI+ VRM Super Alloy Power GPU Tweak |
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