14 DAY TRIAL // Sapphire has recently announced that it has updated its product portfolio with the introduction of two new graphics cards based on AMD’s Radeon HD 7870 design, one of these coming with a factory overclocked GPU.
Both of these cards use a cooling system developed in-house by Sapphire, which relies on two high-airflow fans for dissipating the heat produced by the graphics cards while running.
Right beneath these two fans, Sapphire has placed a large aluminum fin array that draws the heat away from the Radeon HD 7870 GPU, via four large copper heatpipes.
This powerful cooling assembly enabled Sapphire to increase the operating frequency of the HD 7870 GHz OC Edition to 1050MHz, 50MHz more than AMD’s recommended clock for the HD 7870, while the memory speed was also increased to reach 1,250MHz (5GHz data rate).
Users who require even more performance can also overclock the card beyond these frequencies using the TriXX utility that comes bundled with Sapphire’s creation.
Apart from the GPU and memory clocks, Sapphire’s tool also allows for the GPU voltage to be modified over its stock settings.
Pricing for the HD 7870 GHz OC Edition hasn’t been announced yet, but this is expected to surpass AMD’s $350 (265 EUR) MSRP.
Made official earlier today, the Radeon HD 7870 uses the Pitcairn XT GPU, which includes a total of 1280 stream processors, 80 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 256-bit wide memory bus that is connected to 2GB of video buffer.
The stock operating clocks of the video card are set at 1GHz for the GPU, while the GDDR5 memory is running at 1.20GHz (4.8GHz data rate), which are also the frequencies used by the non-OC Sapphire HD 7870 GHz Edition.
