AMD Radeon HD 7870 Pitcairn Graphics Cards Spotted in the Wild

With just a few more weeks separating us from the launch of AMD’s Pitcairn GPUs, also known as the Radeon HD 7800 series, an image allegedly depicting two such cards was posted online by a Chinese website.

Not much can be seen from the picture published on the PC in Life forums, but the two cards presented are reported to be based on the Pitcairn XT GPU, which means that we are dealing with the Radeon HD 7870.

Both of these cards use a black PCB, just as the Radeon HD 7900-series, and are covered by a black/red plastic shroud with a blower fan placed to the right of the GPU.

While no information regarding the specs of these graphics cards was provided by the source, some previous leaks have suggested that AMD’s Radeon HD 7800 models will 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 that will all be connected to the memory via a 256-bit wide bus.

Thanks to the 1,375MHz (5.5GHz data rate) VRAM operating clock, this configuration should be able to deliver 176GB/s worth of memory bandwidth.

As far as the GPU is concerned, this will work at 950MHz, making it the second highest clocked graphics core in the Radeon HD 7000-series after the HD 7770.

For the Radeon HD 7850, AMD will decrease this frequency to 900MHz, while the memory will also be downclocked from 1,375MHz to 1,250MHz (5GHz data rate). This drops the memory bandwidth available to the GPU to 160GB/s. 

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.

The Radeon HD 7800 series graphics cards based on the 28nm Pitcairn GPU should arrive in the first part of March.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview