14 DAY TRIAL // What some may have missed about the Club 3D Radeon HD 7870 JokerCard is that the product is powered by the Tahiti LE, the latest graphics processing unit from Advanced Micro Devices.
Last time we heard about it, the chip was set for an official introduction, of sorts, on November 27 this year (2012).
Club 3D was just a bit quicker than the rest of the OEMs that put together Radeon HD 7870 video cards powered by Tahiti LE chips.
Strangely though, it has been said that there won't be all that many other such video cards available.
The folks at TechPowerUp stated that they spoke to “industry sources” and found out that a number of high-profile companies wouldn't launch Tahiti LE cards at all.
No precise reason is given for this, although it is possible that the “limited edition” factor played a key part in this choice.
The Tahiti LE GPU, with its 1,536 Graphics CoreNext stream processors and 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface, was made specifically for a limited run of Radeon HD 7870.
Christmas is coming soon, which makes this the holiday shopping season. Few things help sales better than a product being “new” and “fresh.”
And here it is worth to point out that AMD strategically set the launch of the GPU a few days after Black Friday, so that it doesn't have to bother thinking about discounts with the potential of completely defeating the purpose of making a special run of a video board.
We do not know exactly how many companies will still make Radeon HD 7870 “Tahiti LE” graphics cards. Since Club 3D already has one out, and it has TUL as contract manufacturer, it is safe to assume PowerCoolor and VTX3D, both sharing the same manufacturer, will also make announcements.
All of them should have 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM and clock speeds of 925 MHz for the GPU (975 MHz boost) and 6 GHz for the memory. Compared to NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660, it is supposed to be 15% faster for the same price ($220 / 220 Euro).