ASUS HD7870-DC2-2GD5 Pro Reviews

Overall the Asus Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II looks like a pretty good graphics card. The problem is that it finds itself up against the brand new nVidia GTX 670. And on that score it's a loser. The latter card may be more expensive, but for an extra £50 it gives you far more performance, and a slight improvement in power consumption too. Unless you really can't go up the extra, the 7870 remains, without a price drop, the second choice in its category.

Straight out of the box, the ASUS HD 7870 DirectCU II TOP provided the exact same gaming experience as a reference AMD Radeon 7950, which at a first glance seems like a great thing. The fact that the lower tier HD 7870 GPU is matching the performance of the higher tier HD 7950 GPU. However, pricing is so out of place with Radeon HD 7870 GPUs that the ASUS HD 7870 DirectCU II TOP video card is actually priced similar to the Radeon HD 7950! When you can buy a Radeon HD 7950 for the exact same price as the ASUS HD 7870 DirectCU II TOP video card (and in fact the 7950 is even cheaper with the rebate) then the common sense thing would be to go ahead and get the Radeon HD 7950. The Radeon HD 7950 has more streaming processors, and also has the potential to be overclocked. Though the ASUS HD 7870 DirectCU II TOP video card produced phenomenal overclocking performance, there is more potential with a Radeon HD 7950. The Radeon HD 7950 gains more performance when overclocked due to having more stream processors than a Radeon HD 7870. The Radeon HD 7870 is really in a tough spot these days. Prices on AMD video cards have been falling all around it. We've seen prices drop on Radeon HD 7970, we've seen prices drop on Radeon HD 7950, and we've even seen prices drop on Radeon HD 7770. However, the one constant that hasn't budged as much as those video cards is the Radeon HD 7870. It is priced in an odd position right now competing with the Radeon HD 7950. When you look at customized video cards like the ASUS HD 7870 DirectCU II TOP video card ASUS is obviously going to hike the price up on their fastest customized video cards. The problem is, this price hike puts the 7870 square in the face of the Radeon HD 7950.