Sapphire HD 7870 FleX Edition Video Card

Test System

• Intel i7-3820
• Corsair H100 w/ push-pull
• ASRock X79 Fatal1ty Professional
• 16gb G-Skill RAM @1600
• Raidmax 1200 watt
• 128gb Crucial M4 SSD
• 4x Seagate Barracudas in RAID 5 with Adaptec 6805TQ
• Windows 7 Professional x64 with all updates

3DMark 11

3DMark 11 is the latest iteration of 3DMark benchmarking software. This new version is designed to test DirectX 11 features. After running the card through a gambit of tests, it spits out an aggregate score which you can compare to other systems on their website.

We see that our 7870 FleX was able to score 2044. That’s about 400 points lower than what a 7950 can score on the same system. It’s still an impressive score never the less.

3DMark Vantage

While 3DMark 11 is geared towards DirectX 11, 3DMark Vantage is geared towards DirectX 10. Even though the software is only able to test out DirectX 10, there are still plenty of games out there that run on it and it is still able to bring powerful cards to their knees.

In the two GPU tests the 7870 FleX was able to produce 42.64 and 29.17 FPS respectively. That leads to a total GPU score of 12296.

Furmark

Furmark is a GPU stress test and benchmark utility that puts a graphics card through its paces by making it render a scene involving a furry doughnut.

Furmark is a good utility to use when overclocking or testing the cooling of a graphics card. Not only does it tell you how well the card does in its benchmark, but it also tells you how hot it got during the whole thing. To give you an idea on how much performance AMD is able to squeeze out of this new 28nm die shrink, a previous gen 6950 was only able to score 2534 and got up to a temp of 85 C while doing it. The current gen 7870 was able to score 27569, but only reached 65 C. A decrease of 20 C will make a noticeable difference in overall system cooling.

Unigine Heaven

The Heaven benchmark is design to test out the DirectX 11 performance of a card. It runs through a series of scenes and reports back with frame rate information and an overall score.

The 7870 FleX was able to score an impressive 63 FPS on average. This is actually a higher average than the 7950 FleX got. This makes me think that something else may be going on that is affecting performance for this benchmark.

Battlefield 3

Love it or hate it, Battlefield 3 is the “in” game right now. It also happens to be a pretty good test for graphics hardware.

We can see that at 1920×1080 we have an average FPS of 55. AMD’s performance in Battlefield 3 has been lagging a bit behind NVidia’s. With the new Catalyst 12.7 drivers around the corner, AMD is hoping to close the gap.

DiRT 3

DiRT 3 is a racing simulation game where you’re put in the drivers seat through intense rally courses. It puts a decent stress on graphics cards and looks gorgeous in a 3 monitor Eyefinity setup.

	1920×1080	5760×1080 (Eyefinety)

When we compare the average FPS between 1920×1080 and 5760×1080, it is practically the same. The lowest the frame rate dip at any time is only 60.82 FPS. That’s more than high enough to have solid gaming performance.