 Welcome to my much delayed unboxing of the Radeon HD 7870 from XFX. This is their core edition card, but even though it's a core or like a more basic edition card I guess compared to their double D card which has two cooling fans, this is still a gigahertz edition card. So the GPU itself is clocked at 1 gigahertz. So this is not based on the same GPU as the 7950 and the 7970 which are using a larger die, a more complicated chip to produce. This is using the PitKaren core which is the same one as is in the 7870 as well as the 7850. Now performance wise, the 7870 falls just in the range of a GTX 570 or 580 usually falling in between those two cards from the competition, but because this is manufactured on a more advanced process it is able to achieve that performance with less power consumption as well as a lower price. So let's see what XFX includes with their particular card here. A Crossfire Bridge, that's a standard length one, however if your motherboard requires a longer one they usually come with them. They do not disturb, I'm gaming door hanger. I have their old one from back when XFX was Nvidia exclusive over there on my door. I've also got a driver DVD, download the latest off the AMD website. Limited warranty terms for full details, please refer to Support Central. So they actually don't include that in the documentation, they just want you to go online and check it out, that's sort of smart. Quick install guide, install guide for the drivers, Pro Series power supply brochure for their power supplies as well as some other great XFX products, another brochure. Okay so that's pretty much all the information we need. Let's have a look at the XFX Radeon 7870 itself. Now these have been in a bit of a production shortfall for the most part since they were released, but what that should tell you about them is that they deliver a very compelling price to performance ratio and also, let me just take this off here, and also that people are demanding these cards. So let's have a closer look at this particular card, XFX does such a good job of the aesthetics and the overall look of their GPUs, but let's dig a little bit deeper and find out how well designed this is. Check this out, so this is a very beefy cooler considering that even though this is an enthusiast class of card, this is still not the highest end GPU which you find on the 7950 and the 7970. So they've put an aluminum unisink across almost the entire card itself which is making contact with key components that do need to be cooled while staying well elevated over other components that don't need to be cooled. So you can see there's gaps in it here, here, down in there, I hope you can see that, where you can see right through to the PCB which is giving you airflow over the components that don't need to be directly contacted by the unisink and providing extra cooling to those that do, so that's a very neat design choice. I actually haven't seen that before. It then uses an aluminum shroud which has like a brushed look as well as some sort of chromey looking accents with their ghost thermal technology slogan on here as well as the XFX logo here. We've got a standard-ish, I guess it's getting standard these days although it's still not on many reference cards, but an 80mm fan in the middle. We've also got four heat pipes that are carrying heat away from the GPU itself, can you see those okay? Away from the GPU itself, you'll be able to see them better from the top, and then out to two aluminum fin arrays on either side of the fan itself, so that is how the GPU is getting cooled. They, yeah, like I said, they're so good at this, check this out. So we've got another metal brushed piece which is Radeon Red, is it AMD Red? I mean, AMD's color's never been red, but they're still using the ATI Red on the graphics cards, which looks absolutely fantastic. Power for this card is provided by two PCIe 6-pin power adapters, and it supports up to two-way crossfire, so AMD has removed the option for multi-way crossfire configurations from this card. It makes sense because honestly if you're buying three sort of step-down GPUs, you should probably just be buying one or two higher-end ones instead because it's going to yield better performance due to the way that crossfire and actually SLI technology both inherently scale. Now in terms of output options, this is a 2GB graphics card which means that it is more than capable of driving slightly older games, and by older I don't mean like three, four years old, I mean like sort of last year, six months ago, like current generation as well as older games at extremely high resolution. So having that extra graphics memory makes all the difference in the world because you have to load all the textures into the memory. So even if you have a high-performance card that's maybe from the competition, say like a GTX 570 with only 1.2 gigs of memory, the 7870 will absolutely rock it as soon as you start to increase the resolution beyond a single monitor. So what that means is that this monitor or this card not only supports up to four displays out concurrently using two DVIs, a DVI and an HDMI, or a DVI and an HDMI and then the two mini display ports, but it can actually drive games. As long as you're not GPU bound, it has enough memory to hold all the textures necessary that you don't end up crippling the performance. This is a PCIe 3.0 16x card, so that rounds out its sort of current to future generation technology, so that means with your new Ivy Bridge system or your Sandy Bridge E system, you will be able to take advantage of all of that bandwidth, although it's quite debatable whether or not that's going to make any performance difference whatsoever. So basically, good pricing, good performance, and really the reason I'm doing this unboxing is because I really needed one so that I could test it against the upcoming GTX... Oh wait, I probably shouldn't say so that I can release this video right away. Thanks for checking out this video. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.