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Choosing a 7870

M

marlinman

Member
I can wait no longer to replace my 5830, and have convinced myself to go for a 7870. Currently have my eye on the vanilla Sapphire model, but am wondering if I'd be better served choosing a more flavourful card.

If I'm quite prepared to overclock the thing myself, and have a more-than-adequately cooled case, is there any reason not to go with this bog standard model?
 
If you're OCing, you may want to consider the 7850, which is ~5% or so slower at any given clock (and when overclocking both will be able to reach about the same clock, depending on your luck with the silicon lottery) and ~30% cheaper.

At release, when all the reviews were done, the 7850 had some kind of limitation that kept it to 1050 core (which every review seemed to be able to achieve). Now these tools can be used to reach higher and 7850s are topping out at the same 1150-1300 MHz range that 77xx, 7870s and 79xx cards have been reaching.
 
Concillian said:
If you're OCing, you may want to consider the 7850, which is ~5% or so slower at any given clock (and when overclocking both will be able to reach about the same clock, depending on your luck with the silicon lottery) and ~30% cheaper.

At release, when all the reviews were done, the 7850 had some kind of limitation that kept it to 1050 core (which every review seemed to be able to achieve). Now these tools can be used to reach higher and 7850s are topping out at the same 1150-1300 MHz range that 77xx, 7870s and 79xx cards have been reaching.
Click to expand...
Hey would you mind helping me overclock my new 7850? I would like to hit ~1200mhz on the core like you're talking about.

Do I need to flash the bios to do it? What software do I need to use? How do you get over that 1050 core "limit"?

TIA
 
RavenSEAL said:
Sapphire, Sapphire & Sapphire.
Click to expand...

Please elaborate! (Seriously. I can't parse this.)

RavenSEAL said:
If you want to get better cooling, MSI Twin Frozer.
Click to expand...

This card is >18% more costly in NZ than the stock Sapph. Would a maximally o/ced MSI be significantly faster, or live much longer, than a maximally o/ced Sapph?

Concillian said:
If you're OCing, you may want to consider the 7850, which is ~5% or so slower at any given clock (and when overclocking both will be able to reach about the same clock, depending on your luck with the silicon lottery) and ~30% cheaper.

At release, when all the reviews were done, the 7850 had some kind of limitation that kept it to 1050 core (which every review seemed to be able to achieve). Now these tools can be used to reach higher and 7850s are topping out at the same 1150-1300 MHz range that 77xx, 7870s and 79xx cards have been reaching.
Click to expand...

The 7870 is a massive 38% more costly here. The speed delta is more like 15% tho', is it not? Food for thought/good to know, tho'...
 
marlinman said:
Please elaborate! (Seriously. I can't parse this.)



This card is >18% more costly in NZ than the stock Sapph. Would a maximally o/ced MSI be significantly faster, or live much longer, than a maximally o/ced Sapph?



The 7870 is a massive 38% more costly here. The speed delta is more like 15% tho', is it not? Food for thought/good to know, tho'...
Click to expand...

I've had 4 Sapphire cards (Currently using two, see sig), all have been as solid as a video card can get. I'm talking out of experience, not just my "butt" 😉
 
Get one of the Dual-X ones if a quiet system is a priority. Oh my gosh, those things are *so* quiet. At under 70% load, you prob won't even know they're on, and even at 100%, they're less loud than some of the faster 80mm fans you can buy. Definitely 2-3x as quiet as a reference 5870 or 6970
 
Is it usual for reviewers to all but ignore each manufacturer's reference design? I'm having trouble finding reviews :-\ . Can I assume that e.g. the vanilla Sapphire 7870 will perform pretty much identically to the reference design samples provided to reviewers by AMD (Si lottery-based differences aside)?
 
SickBeast said:
Hey would you mind helping me overclock my new 7850? I would like to hit ~1200mhz on the core like you're talking about.

Do I need to flash the bios to do it? What software do I need to use? How do you get over that 1050 core "limit"?

TIA
Click to expand...

Enabling "unofficial" overclock parameters in Afterburner:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=338906

I believe that the ASUS utility does this kind of thing by default for ASUS cards.
 
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SickBeast said:
Hey would you mind helping me overclock my new 7850? I would like to hit ~1200mhz on the core like you're talking about.

Do I need to flash the bios to do it? What software do I need to use? How do you get over that 1050 core "limit"?

TIA
Click to expand...

Install both asus gpu tweak and msi afterburner. Latest version 2.0.53 (dated 2/21) on the asus website will extend your clocks. Afterburner won't do the trick but it is better for oc'ing.

Anyway, install asus gpu tweak, reboot. Then go to tuning, enable "extend overclock range". click apply. Reboot again. You now have extended clocks and can clock as high as you want, MSI afterburner is better for the actual OC. You can uninstall asus gpu tweak at this point.

This might be confusing, but basically gpu tweak will extend your clocks (afterburner doesn't unless you have an overlapped install). MSI afterburner is far better for actual tweaking once your clocks are extended. So install gpu tweak to extend the clocks and bypass the control panel limit, then use msi afterburner for the actual oc.
 
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marlinman said:
The 7870 is a massive 38% more costly here. The speed delta is more like 15% tho', is it not? Food for thought/good to know, tho'...
Click to expand...

You're right, it's probably more than ~6%, I thought it was a 1 cluster difference between the two, but it looks like a 2 cluster difference. Probably more like 10-12% difference at the same clock.

It will depend on the game though. BF3 seems pretty shader intensive, and it sees a larger difference, while games that are getting more out of the ROPs & memory and less from the shaders will see a smaller difference.
 
marlinman said:
Is it usual for reviewers to all but ignore each manufacturer's reference design? I'm having trouble finding reviews :-\ . Can I assume that e.g. the vanilla Sapphire 7870 will perform pretty much identically to the reference design samples provided to reviewers by AMD (Si lottery-based differences aside)?
Click to expand...

Iirc, all the reference cards are manufactured by Sapphire. If you're getting a reference card, the only difference is going to be in RMA, warranty and the sticker on the shroud 🙂

If you want to go with custom cooling, Sapphire, MSI and Gigabyte are all great choices.
 
Concillian said:
At release, when all the reviews were done, the 7850 had some kind of limitation that kept it to 1050 core (which every review seemed to be able to achieve). Now these tools can be used to reach higher and 7850s are topping out at the same 1150-1300 MHz range that 77xx, 7870s and 79xx cards have been reaching.
Click to expand...

Hm, while the only one I would personally consider is the 7750 (cheapskate), that's interesting because in reviews both the 7850 adn 7750 were rather poor overclockers. Has anyone done any benchmarks on overclocked 77XXs and 78XXs to get an idea of scaling?

On a totally different subject, I wonder if ZeroPower will be made to work with APUs and preferable with both AMD's and Intel's: something like Lucid's Virtu MVP. Use the APU for 2D, turn the dGPU down to (near) zero power and have it only come on when doing 3D stuff. Less power, less noise!
 
SickBeast said:
Hey would you mind helping me overclock my new 7850? I would like to hit ~1200mhz on the core like you're talking about.

Do I need to flash the bios to do it? What software do I need to use? How do you get over that 1050 core "limit"?

TIA
Click to expand...


bf3lr.jpg


http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18389760
 
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Yeah icons are gangsta lol (+1 for confusing though) 😉

If you read further down, there is a bit that compares some results to the 7870 overclocked
 
I purchased the Gigabyte HD 7870 OC 1100MHZ (Part # GV-R787OC-2GD) recently. Good overclock out of the box, very good cooler. The default fan profile is a little loud for my tastes (I really really like my quiet), but you can turn the fan down to 25% using CCC, at which point it's nearly inaudible.

With that 25% fan speed the highest temperature I've seen when running Furmark + Prime95 (i5 2500K @ 4.0Ghz, 1.25V) is 72C.
 
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