ASUS Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II

October 15, 2012 by Lawrence Lee

Recently we reviewed the ASUS GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II OC, a top-of-the-line graphics card with a large and impressive dual fan heatsink. While it's a superb video card, as with most cutting-edge PC hardware, it's a prime example of diminishing returns on investment. The more you pay, the less improvement you get; a US$460 GTX 680 unfortunately doesn't offer twice as much performance as a card half the price like the Radeon HD 7870. Slower cards tend to almost always give you more bang for your buck until you hit the sweet spot which is actually somewhere around the US$100 mark.

The HD 7870 doesn't represent the best value available but it certainly offers more than it did at release. Launched in March with a MSRP of about US$350, the HD 7870 has since tumbled in price by more than US$100 though it still occupies a mid-to-high position in AMD's Radeon HD 7000 lineup. Based on AMD's 28 nm "Pitcairn" architecture, the 7870 die is packed with with 1280 stream processors and a 256-bit memory interface. The reference model calls for a core clock speed of 1000 MHz (making it a "GHz Edition", a seemingly superfluous naming convention) and 2GB of GDDR5 1200 MHz, to which our ASUS HD 7870 DirectCU II sample conforms.

Though "DirectCU II" is printed clearly on the box and heatsink shroud, it isn't the same bulky cooler found on the GTX 680 DirectCU II OC. The moniker describes the style of cooler ASUS uses on most of their cards to differentiate it from reference cooling solutions — it's not a single, distinctive heatsink model. Compared to the GTX 680's heatsink, this is a much smaller cooling solution, taking up only two slots in total as the fans are substantially thinner. The layout is also completely flipped around, with fins running down the length of the board rather than widthwise, and heatpipes intersecting them on the perpendicular.

To befuddle consumers, ASUS is currently offering four separate versions of the HD 7870 with minor variations in the model number to differentiate them. The D2T's are clocked higher than the DC2's, at 1100/1250 MHz, while the V2 editions have more advanced voltage regulation circuitry (DIGI+VRM) and trade two mini-DisplayPorts for one regular DisplayPort and an additional DVI connection. Our sample is the HD7870-DC2-2GD5-V2 (in bold in the table above).