Earlier this year AMD launched their Radeon HD 7800 Series. The GPU, Pitcairn, is a downscale from the HD 7900 "Tahiti" silicon, which introduced AMD's new Graphics Core Next architecture. Targeting a wide price-range between $250-$350, the HD 7800 series falls into the market-segment both AMD and NVIDIA have known to refer to as the "sweetspot" segment. Apart from 1280 stream processors, Pitcairn has 80 Texture Memory Units (TMUs), 32 ROPs (Raster Operations), and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory.

PowerColor's HD 7870 PCS+ is a fully customized HD 7870 design implementation. It comes with a dual fan cooler and a large overclock out of the box making it one of the fastest HD 7870 cards around. We have seen many price reductions of the HD 7870, bringing its price down significantly. At this time the PowerColor HD 7870 Vortex II retails at $320, $70 higher than the cheapest HD 7870 available.