From my past experience replacing stock thermal paste to MX-4, Yes you can see the change in load temps especially but not that much I would say more or less ~1-3degC cooler than before. I guess there's no harm to try it for yourself and feel the experience..if this is the first time you're doing this, be careful with the board and components there just as precaution.

After all we dont want to damage our expensive card just to reduce 1-2degC in load temps. Do it slowly and carefully . Good luck bro..

the steps to OC our GPU are pretty much the same:

Guru 3D:  http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/radeo...ck_guide,2.html

Hardocp: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/07/02/...ii_top_review/3

You can use either MSI AB, Asus GPU Tweak or Sapphire Trixx(Download from my 1st post) to OC your HD7870 OC. each time we increase our GPU core and memory clocks, we have to test its stability by performing a GPU stress test and couple round of bencmark sessions. If our PC is stable after let say few hours of test, we may increase again the clock,

I prefer we do it one by one. Start with OC the GPU core first. Once we find the maximum stable clock...reduce it about 10-15MHz and that's our Max OC for GPU clock..then only we can start with overclocking mem clock by going thru the same process.

I dont know if you aware of this, and I dont like to share a bad news either but the truth is a lot of 7870's users out there are having a problem like black screen, PC freeze, driver reset etc.. I am not sure about BSOD though, can you please share with us your BSOD code? it should be something like 0x124, 0x101, 0x0A etc.. it could also be your games ( either ori or not?).

maybe other user with HD7870 card can enlighten us here? I'll try to get some info regarding your problem..

I heard about Sapphire problem that was the reason i went for MSI TwinFrzr iii.

What problem they had? Did their problem occur when they OC?

Mine is mainly BSOD usually when i start the game at higher OC. When i switch it to higher OC after entering game is more stable.

So how you prove your card is faulty to get warranty?

True, I believe that this is related to the hardware(7870) and driver compatibility issue or either the design of the hardware itself was faulty since I'm using 7970s without any of these issues since Jan this year until now. But I'm seeing the same problem when the time I'm using hd7850 just that not as serious as 7870. it could be AMD pitcairn design flaw or something like that, need to do more study with uncle G to get an answer..

I dont remember most of the 7870 users whose complaining about the issues only on Sapphire hd7870. It happened to all 7870 owners not only specific to Sapphire, you may check forums like guru3d, oc.net etc to get more info about this issue.

For those who're having a problem with hd7870, you may want to refer to below link for some information.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=371032