Introduction

Already really impressed with what the AMD HD 7850 2GB is able to offer us, it's time to see what its big brother, the brand new Radeon HD 7870, is able to bring to the table with its higher $349 price tag. If what we've already seen from the new series is anything to go by, though, we're expecting some good things out of the higher end model.

We've mentioned a lot about our thoughts on the HD 7700 series as a whole along with the general thought process on each model and like we've said every time, while AMD has the HD 6800 series at a similar price point, the HD 7700 series continues to lose its shine as it sits slower.

The HD 7800 series and HD 7900 series on the other hand don't have any competition within their own camp giving us a price point from AMD that isn't offered at the moment. So far we've seen the HD 7850 hits that $249 price tag perfectly. Now we want to find out if the extra $100 associated with the HD 7870 is worth the jump up.

Before we look at performance, though, the first thing we need to do is take a closer look at the card itself. Once we've done that we'll take a closer look at the specifications of the card and see how it differs compared to its little brother, move into our testbed, check out the other cards we'll be including in our graphs today and then of course get into the performance side of things.