Introduction

Over the last few weeks we've looked at some high-end video cards from both AMD and NVIDIA thanks to partners starting to release high-end variants of the HD 7900 series while NVIDIA of course launched the new GTX 680.

Today, though, we'll be stepping back a little to the mid-range market again as we check out the Sapphire HD 7870 2GB OC. This is one of a few HD 7800 series based video cards we've got here at the moment and over the next week or two you'll see a couple of variants from different companies.

Today though is all about the Sapphire version which hopefully stands out for all the right reasons. Over the last few months since the release of the HD 7000 series we've seen some awesome Sapphire cards that have offered awesome coolers that have not only ran extremely quiet, but have been able to keep GPU temperatures at amazingly low numbers.

Hopefully the new HD 7870 gets the same treatment and we've got a cooler that works as just as well. Before we take a look at the card, though, the first thing we need to do is look at the package of the card to see just what's going on in that department.

Once we've gone over the package we'll move onto the card itself and take a closer look at the cooler that Sapphire has opted for while also seeing some of the other standout features on the card. Once we've done that we'll then of course move onto the specification side of things where we'll look at the kind of overclock Sapphire is offering us today on this OC model.

Then as always we'll get into the fun stuff and see just what kind of performance we're able to get out the card against a number of others. As we've just mentioned, though, the first thing we've got to do is check out the bundle.

Package

Moving inside the box Sapphire as usual has done a pretty good job with the bundle.

We've got the normal line up of extras including paperwork, Molex to PCIe power connectors, DVI to VGA connector and CrossFire bridge. Along with that we've also got a HDMI to DVI convertor, MiniDP to DisplayPort convertor and a full size HDMI cable.