Today we are looking at the Radeon 7870 GHz Edition model 7870PE52GV from Diamond Multimedia. Yes, that Diamond Multimedia.

If you were building gaming PCs in the late 90′s, you may have used a Diamond Monster3D 3DFX Voodoo card for 3D gaming, perhaps with their one of their Diamond Stealth series 2D accelerators. One of my favorite pieces of PC hardware before starting HCW was the Diamond Monster Sound MX300 – it had an Aureal Vortex2 ASIC that would provide hardware acceleration for the A3D sound API. I much preferred this over EAX (Creative Labs ended up paying $26 million to bury Aureal in lawsuits. Aureal won, but went bankrupt defending themselves), but unfortunately Windows 7 made this style of audio acceleration obsolete (poor Creative, right?).

Diamond Multimedia is now a brand owned by the broadband hardware company BestData based in Los Angeles, and have started selling video cards again, exclusively based on AMD GPUs.