Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire vs Radeon HD 7970

If you are going to buy a new graphics card and are choosing between Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire and Radeon HD 7970, there are a couple of things to consider. Cards with more VRAM in general perform better and allow you to play on higher graphics settings. Size also makes a difference. A model with a large heatsink can occupy up to three expansion slots on a motherboard. Be sure you have enough room in your PC case. When comparing GPUs with different architectures, more processing cores and even higher TFLOPS will not always translate to better performance. To help you decide which GPU you need, we have measured frame rates in a number of popular games. For more on how the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire stacks up against Radeon HD 7970, check out specs charts below.

Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire is a Laptop Graphics Card

Note: Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire is only used in laptop graphics. It has lower GPU clock speed compared to the desktop variant, which results in lower power consumption, but also 10-30% lower gaming performance. Check available laptop models with Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire here:

Main Specs

  Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire Radeon HD 7970
Power consumption (TDP) 120 Watt 300 Watt
Interface PCIe 3.0 x16
Supplementary power connectors 1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin
Memory type DDR3, GDDR3, GDDR5 GDDR5
Maximum RAM amount 2x1 GB 3 GB
Display Connectors 1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 2x mini-DisplayPort
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  • Radeon HD 7970 has 150% more power consumption, than Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire.
  • Radeon HD 7970 has 1 GB more memory, than Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire.
  • Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire is used in Laptops, and Radeon HD 7970 - in Desktops.
  • Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire is build with Terascale 2 architecture, and Radeon HD 7970 - with GCN.
  • Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire is manufactured by 40 nm process technology, and Radeon HD 7970 - by 28 nm process technology.
  • Memory clock speed of Radeon HD 7970 is 375 MHz higher, than Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire.

Game benchmarks

high / 1080p 16−18 35−40
ultra / 1080p 9−10 21−24
QHD / 1440p 4−5 16−18
4K / 2160p 10−11
low / 720p 30−35 60−65
medium / 1080p 18−20 40−45
The average gaming FPS of Radeon HD 7970 in Assassin's Creed Odyssey is 125% more, than Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire.

Full Specs

  Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire Radeon HD 7970
Architecture Terascale 2 GCN
Code name Broadway-XT Tahiti XT
Type Laptop Desktop
Release date 7 January 2010 22 December 2011
Pipelines 1600 2048
Core clock speed 700 MHz
Boost Clock 925 MHz
Transistor count 4,313 million
Manufacturing process technology 40 nm 28 nm
Texture fill rate 118.4
Floating-point performance 3,789 gflops
Length 274 mm
Memory bus width 128 Bit 384 Bit
Memory clock speed 1000 MHz 1375 MHz
Memory bandwidth 264 GB/s
Shared memory - -
DirectX DirectX 11, Shader 5.0
Shader Model 5.1
OpenGL 4.6
OpenCL 1.2
FreeSync +
Bus support PCIe 2.1 x16
HDMI +
Bitcoin / BTC (SHA256) 485 Mh/s
Laptop size large
Eyefinity +
Design reference
CrossFire +
Ethereum / ETH (DaggerHashimoto) 20.71 Mh/s
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