AMD Radeon HD 7870 And 7850 Review: Pitcairn Gets Benchmarked

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There's a big hole in between AMD's $450 Radeon HD 7950 and its $160 Radeon HD 7700. Today, the company introduces Radeon HD 7850 and 7870 to fill that gap, and they push a lot more performance than we expected. But are they really ready for prime time?

Benchmark Results: StarCraft II

Our StarCraft II benchmark results require a little background. This was one of the games tested in our German lab. Unfortunately, the Radeon HD 7850 they received wasn’t stable either. So, Igor dialed his core clock back to 845 MHz in order to make it through this test.

Incidentally, World of Warcraft (another Blizzard title) was the US lab’s most problematic game to benchmark.

The most surprising results in StarCraft II come from our Radeon HD 7850. Although we were able to complete benchmarks successfully with the underclocked card, there’s still something very wrong with where it places.  

Don Woligroski
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Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.