14 DAY TRIAL // The latest low-cost AMD Radeon graphics card has been revealed through leaks on the Chiphell Forums. The R7 370 is, in fact, the old Pitcairn architecture that launched in the old Radeon 200 series and named Curacao during the process.
This is clearly an old machine, but for users on a budget, AMD still considers it a good product, and to make sure it'll sell, rebranded it as the R7 370. The reason to move it to the R7 line and not the R9 is the massive performance gap between the Tango and the Hawaii line of GPUs, which are brand-new, powerful machines that will represent the R9 high-performance series.
Moreover, the R7 still uses Crossfire PCI-Express pins instead of the more recent XDMA technology that will be present in its newer brothers. Also since AMD hasn't designed any fresh GCN chip since the Hawaii, it's clear that this can be only the older Pitcairn chip. The only peculiar thing is why AMD has decided to rebrand old tech in a new series of graphics cards.
Slight make-up in performance
If we look closely at the pics, we can see the same overall design as the Fiji high-end graphics cards. But under the fancy, modern hood lies an old card that includes one Crossfire connector, a 6-Pin connector that will give the card 140W of board power.
At the back of the card, we can see 2xDVI ports, HDMI and a single DisplayPort. Performance-wise, the "new" card will probably have the same output as R7 270X. The 2 GB GDDR5 memory will work along a 256-bit memory bus at 5.6 GHz clock speed, packing 179 GB/s bandwidth. It is highly likely that the Pitcairn XT will launch as the Radeon R7 370X.
AMD hopes it will be able to rival Nvidia's mid-end graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, prompting a slight increase in performance overall.
