In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7870 PowerColor Devil Edition are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition.

The HD 7870 has a 90 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the HD 7870. This results in the HD 7870 providing 7.2 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 7870 has a 90 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 7870 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 7870 providing 2.9 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 7870 was released less than a year after the HD 7870, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The Radeon HD 7870 PowerColor Devil Edition and the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The HD 7870 has 5.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7870, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7870 is marginally better than the HD 7870.

The Radeon HD 7870 PowerColor Devil Edition has 1024 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II 2GB Edition has 1280. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 957 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1099. The HD 7870 having 142 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 7870 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7870.