PowerColor recommends a 500W or greater power supply for this video card. The PowerColor PCS HD7870 MYST has a pair of 6-pin PCI Express power connectors located at the end of the video card.
#Myst review series
This card does not have the ‘Dual BIOS Toggle Switch’ that is found on the Radeon HD 7900 series cards nor any fan buttons or anything like that. The PowerColor PCS HD7870 MYST has one CrossFireX interconnect, which means that you can run CrossFire with another card if you wanted to boost performance. The GPU cooler has a SSU shaped direct touch heatpipe design that utilizes a pair of S shaped heatpipes and a single U shaped heatpipe to better transfer the head from the GPU to the aluminum cooling fins of the cooler. We’ll talk more about the noise level of this fan later on in this review. The PowerColor PCS HD7870 MYST video card is kept cool by a single 92mm 4-pin PWM cooling fan. The GPU Cooler uses 53mm mounting holes, so you you plan on changing the GPU cooler or adding a water block you easily can. None of the memory chips for the 2GB of GDDR5 memory are located on the back of the card, but they can be seen on the front and they are Elpida branded. The board measures 266.65mm x 111.2mm x 38mm and as you can tell there is not a back plate. video card flipped over you can better see the black. The PCB is custom made and features part number LF R19FE version 1.1 on our test sample. The copper heatpipes and chrome PCI bracket help break up the all black and add a needed splash of color.Īs you can see from the photo above, the PowerColor PCS HD7870 MYST use a dual-slot cooler with a single cooling fan located in the middle of the card.
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The PowerColor PCS HS7870 MYST features looks like a typical video card with the usual red/black color scheme, but it uses an all metal fan shroud! It is also triple black, so you have a black PCB, black fan and black fan shroud. Which one wins when it comes to gaming performance? That is the question that we set out to answer today to make sure you aren’t missing out on a sleeper card that you dismissed because it wasn’t an AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition card and you thought it was slow due to just the core clocks. A typical AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz edition card features a 1000MHz core clock and 1200MHz memory clock (4.8Gbps), but we know that doesn’t mean much as the cores are entirely different. It is available for $249.99 shipped and features a 975MHz core clock with 2GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1500MHz (6.0Gbps). We’ve spent the past week testing out the PowerColor PCS HD7870 MYST 2GB, which features the ‘new’ Tahiti LE GPU core. The end result here is that it has more of the good stuff and as a result it will be faster than the Pitcairn XT powered AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz edition cards, but use more power as it has a higher TDP. That would have been too easy right? Now you got some Radeon HD 7870 Tahiti LE (TLE) video cards floating around the market, but do gamers really know they are available due to the poor product naming?Īs you can see from the chart above, the AMD Radeon HD 7870 Tahiti LE video cards have 1536 shader processors, 24 compute units, 96 texture units, and 32 ROPs. AMD has allowed video card manufactures to use these new cores in AMD Radeon HD 7870 video cards rather than introducing a new card called the Radeon HD 7930 or something like that.
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That is because in recent months, AMD has introduced the Tahiti LE GPU core, which is a neutered version of the same GPU found on the AMD Radeon HD 79 video cards. When you are buying a video card and are looking for the best performance it would make sense to look for the ones with the highest core clock speed, but you might be missing out.
![myst review myst review](https://www.gamespot.com/a/uploads/original/gamespot/images/2004/reviews/607212-920187_20040928_004.jpg)
We noticed that all of the cards that are available with the exception of two are AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition cards, which means that they have clock speeds over 1000MHz. Most of the cards range between $229 to $249 after rebate and come with Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider game coupons thanks to the AMD Never Settle Reloaded game bundle promotion that is taking place right now. The PowerColor PCS HD7870 MYST – Tahiti LEĪre you looking to buy an AMD Radeon HD 7870 video card? If you are then you’ve likely noticed that there is no shortage of companies that offer them as Newegg alone has 18 different models to pick from.