AMD Radeon HD 7870 & Radeon HD 7850 Review

3Dmark 11 & Test System Specs

Core i7 Test System Specs

• Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz)
• x4 4GB G.Skill DDR3-1600(CAS 8-8-8-20)
• Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 (Intel X79)
• OCZ ZX Series (1250w)
• Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
• AMD Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB)
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB)
• AMD Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB)
• AMD Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB)
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 6990 (4096MB)
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB)
• VisionTek Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB)
• Asus Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 5870 (1024MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 (3072MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 570 (1280MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB)
• Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit
• Nvidia Forceware 295.73
• AMD Catalyst 12.2 + AMD Radeon HD 7800 (8.95.5)

The 3Dmark 11 extreme test claims that the Radeon HD 7870 is just 9% slower than the Radeon HD 7950, which is an incredible result. But possibly more amazing than that is that the Radeon HD 7870 performs ~6% faster than the GeForce GTX 580.

The Radeon HD 7850 is also quite snappy delivering 4% more performance than the Radeon HD 6950 and 20% more performance than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. With that in mind, let’s move on to see how these new Radeon HD 7800 series graphics cards perform in over a dozen games...