PowerColor 7870 MYST Edition (Tahiti LE) Review

[Daveburt714]

I hesitate to call this a review because I'm no expert, but I couldn't think of a better title... So consider it first impressions.
This is the card I picked up yesterday:
http://www.microcenter.com/product/4...ion_Video_Card

Even though I'm not a big gamer the "NeverSettle-Reloaded" bundle was just too hard to pass up and the card didn't disappoint!
Here's some info and results (all tests @ ambient of ~23c):

I did some initial testing (out of the box/stock cooling), and idle temps were ~34c. Using a 3 minute run of Furmark temps shot up to 78c and the fan got a little loud (not obnoxious), but noticeable and the temps were a little high for my taste. So I decided to take the Zalman VF3000 off my old 6870 and put it on this new card.

Here's some pics of the card disassembled:

The HSF had direct contact heat pipes, but the fan was centered over the GPU with no airflow over the pipes...
I'm sure there's a mod in there to make this a NICE cooler!


Here's a shot of the GPU:


Sorry for the following pic but the flash blew things out, my camera's wimpy and my hands aren't steady enough for flashless pics...
Anyway, the card seems to have some decent Hynix DDR5 memory modules onboard:


After the installation of the aftermarket cooler and some ram sinks on the memory chips (they were bare at stock) I decided to see what this card could do...
I'm pretty happy with the results! Using the same tests after the mods the idle temp was 27c and the load temp was 52c after 3 minutes of Furmark.
The fans on the VF3000 were set @ 1800 RPM which is almost silent.

For some reason Afterburner won't allow me to adjust v's, so these clocks were done at stock voltages...
Final (stable) results were 1215 GPU/1650 Mem @ stock voltage and no artifacts! If I had voltage adjustment I could probably push them higher so I stuck with clean runs...


PassMark 3D:


I'm sure the GTX 680 has OC headroom, but it's also a $500 card... In that sense this 7870 is looking pretty good to me...

It's been a long time since I ran Unigine Heaven benchmark, but I DL'd the newest version (4.0) and ran it on this new card tonight.
I may have messed it up because my monitor is 1920x1200 so I ran it "windowed" @ 1920x1080. I did run it at extreme though, so here are the results: