PowerColor DEVIL HD7870 Pro Reviews

PowerColor has decided the HD 7870 is deserving of one final hurrah before the next-generation cards begin to infiltrate the Radeon product stack during the next six months. Equipped with a very quiet, meaty cooler that keeps the underlying Pitcairn XT GPU suitably cool, PowerColor adds to both the core and memory speeds for near-Radeon HD 7950-like performance. Yet the one obvious problem in basing an overclocked design on a venerable GPU is that the competition's newest cards - GeForce GTX 760 in this case - have become better bets in terms of all-round performance and value. We think that PowerColor has done a good job with the HD 7870 Devil 2GB, but if it was our money at stake, we'd probably opt for a GTX 760 instead.

PowerColor's Radeon HD 7870 Devil is the latest in the company's arsenal of graphics cards. Unlike other HD 7870 cards released not too long ago, this one is not based on the "Tahiti LE" graphics processor, yet provides similar performance at much lower power consumption. Being overclocked out of the box, we see an 8% performance improvement over the reference design HD 7870. The HD 7870 is a good, affordable card for 1080p gaming with decent settings—only with the most demanding titles, like Crysis 3, should you reduce settings a bit for higher framerates. Power consumption of the card is significantly higher than the AMD HD 7870 reference board but not as high as Tahiti LE based cards. We see roughly the same gaming power consumption as the GTX 660 Ti and GTX 760, but non-gaming power levels of NVIDIA cards are much better. Especially the PowerColor HD 7870 Devil's high multi-monitor power consumption worries me as it could affect users who focus on productivity, using multiple monitors.

The PowerColor Devil HD7870 is an awesome card, but Powercolor released it 16 months too late and missed the window of opportunity!