AMD Radeon HD 7870, HD 7850 Graphics Cards Reach Retail

Unveiled two weeks ago, AMD’s HD 7870 and HD 7850 graphics card released into the Radeon HD 7000 product family have now become available in the retail space with prices starting at $250 US (about 190 EUR).

The two Radeon HD designs are based on the company’s 28nm Pitcairn graphics core and come equipped with 2GB of GDDR5 video memory buffer.

In the more powerful HD 7870, this will be accompanied by the Pitcairn XT GPU which includes 1408 streaming processors, 88 texture units and 24 ROP units, all of these connected to the memory via a 256-bit wide bus.

Thanks to the 1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) VRAM operating clock, this configuration should be able to deliver 153GB/s worth of memory bandwidth.

As far as the GPU is concerned, this works at 1000MHz, making it the second AMD graphics core to reach this frequency after the HD 7770.

For the Radeon HD 7850, AMD will decrease this frequency to 860MHz, while the memory works at the same 1,200MHz frequency (4.8GHz data rate). 

Other changes brought to the Pitcairn Pro core include a reduction in stream processors count, from 1408 to 1280, the number of texture units available also being lowered to 80 from 88 in the Pitcairn XT. 

“Bringing the first 28nm graphics cards to market in December spurred us to continue pushing the boundaries, product after product, culminating with today’s product availability,” said Zvika Greenstein, director of product management, GPU Division, AMD. 

“Look at our feature set: Graphics Core Next, AMD Eyefinity 2.0, AMD PowerTune, AMD ZeroCore Power technologies and of course our GHz Edition graphics cards – it is without doubt that AMD stands alone in the graphics industry,” concluded the company’s rep.

The recommended prices of the Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850 are set at $350 and $250 (266 and 190 EUR), respectively.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview