PowerColor HD 7870 Vortex II

Review: PowerColor HD 7870 Vortex II

Final Thoughts and Rating

HEXUS Verdict:

...it offers everything you'd expect from a mid-to-high-end solution; including excellent in-game performance at 1080p, low temperatures under load and quiet operation.

We've seen our fair share of Radeon HD 7870s in recent months, and for various reasons, they've had to a tendency to be hit or miss.

PowerColor, however, has managed to get a lot right with the HD 7870 Vortex II. Heavily-overclocked and competitively-priced at £230, it's one of the best cards available at this price point and it offers everything you'd expect from a mid-to-high-end solution; including excellent in-game performance at 1080p, low temperatures under load and quiet operation.

The card itself is impressive, but has it arrived at an opportune time? On the one hand, new games and AMD driver updates are beginning to realise the full potential of the GCN architecture, but on the other hand, the launch of NVIDIA's rival GeForce GTX 660 Ti is imminent.

We'd recommend holding fire until you've seen the bigger picture - our review of the new GeForce will be published soon - but if you're certain the Radeon HD 7870 is the right GPU for you, PowerColor's Vortex II edition is one of the very best.

The Good

Excellent 1080p frame rates
Vortex II fans keep the card cool and quiet
GCN performance is now being fully realised
Has further overclocking headroom

The Bad

GeForce GTX 660 Ti looms near

HEXUS Rating

PowerColor HD 7870 Vortex II

HEXUS Awards

PowerColor HD 7870 Vortex II

HEXUS Where2Buy

The PowerColor Radeon HD 7870 Vortex II graphics card is available to purchase from Ebuyer.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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Best for me:) I hope that incoming 660Ti wont be a faster card:) AMD i believe in you:)

£230 is still way too much for this level of performance, especially compared to the previous generation.

Someone,somewhere at AMD & Nvidia has decided to move mid-range performance into high end prices…not clever.

Bagpuss
£230 is still way too much for this level of performance, especially compared to the previous generation.

Someone,somewhere at AMD & Nvidia has decided to move mid-range performance into high end prices…not clever.

Not sure how you figure that? This OC 7870 - being faster than a 7950 - is around 20% faster than a stock 6970 - the previous generation top end card. And it's priced over 30% cheaper compared to the 6970 launch price, and even 10% cheaper than the 6970 when the 7950/7970 launched. So 20% more performance for 10% lower cost seems pretty reasonable to me…?

The 7870 isn't 6 months old yet. It offers significantly better performance than the top end (AMD) card of the previous generation, despite currently being priced around the same - if you can find a 6970 for sale, that is ;) It performs slightly better than a GTX570, slightly worse than a GTX580 - and it's priced between those two cards, and not much higher than the GTX570. So wherever you look in the previous generation, it seems to me to offer the same or better performance for a similar or lower price…

EDIT: another look back at reviews confirms that the 7950 marginally outperforms a GTX580, so you're looking at an OC 7870 beating a GTX580 at a lower cost…

How can a bad be that the GTX 660 TI “looms near”? The point of the matter is that the 660 hasn't been released and we do not yet know pricing or performance

I'm pretty sure that the Hexus team are intimately acquainted with both the price and the performance of the GTX660Ti, extrapolating from this review and a recent facebook post: