AMD 7850 and 7870

AMD has finally released the much anticipated successors to the 6850 and 6870, which were both fantastic cards, and still are very good. But how do they perform?
I am just going to do a summary of what the other tech sites say, and also only pick the resolutions I feel are relevant (so no 2560x1600 or other super high/low ress). Please note that the results may vary depending on what settings the reviewer used as well as the other components used and what they used to record the performance with. For example Battlefield 3 does not have any built in benchmarking program so the reviewer has to play a section of the game to get results. If one reviewer plays one part of the game, and the other reviewer play some other part the results may look very different.


Battlefield 3

Anandtech

Guru3D (1920x1200, DX11, Ultra settings, 4xMSAA, 16x AF, HBAO enabled)

TechPowerUp

Tom's Hardware

Crysis 2

Guru3D (1920x1200, high ress texture pack, ultra quality, 4x AA, DX11)

TechPowerUp

Tom's Hardware

DiRT 3

Anandtech

TechPowerUp

Tom's Hardware

Temperature and Noise
I am just going to use Anand for this because I prefer his way of measuring.

Overclocking
Just going to do a quick summary here. For more in depth results please see Anandtech, Guru3D and TechPowerUp.

Price, launch date and summary
Both cards will launch the 19th March, which is in 2 weeks from the day this article is written.
7850 - MSRP of 250 USD.
7870 - MSRP of 350 USD.
Not sure how much the cards will cost at launch since the partners such as Asus and MSI might lower the price of their cards, or increase the price on their cards depending on for example which cooler they use, if they get lower quality chips and so on.

Overall I think the 7850 and 7870 are very good cards. They perform very well for the price (especially the 7850), they run cool and they got lots of nice features. The 7870 basically makes the GTX 570 obsolete but the same can't really be said for the 7850 vs the 560 Ti. There is a quite big price difference and you might be better off with the 560 Ti if you can find it for ~200 dollars.
With that being said, Nvidia will soon release their new lineup of cards and that might shake things up a lot. I would personally not buy a card in the upcoming month or so, because once Nvidia launch their cards the customers will have a wider selection of good cards (for example if you want a card for about 350 USD you don't really have much choice other than the 7870, but Kepler will probably change that) and the cards currently on the market will most likely drop in price shortly after the launch.

Last but not least I'll post this wonderful performance summary from TechPowerUp. TechPowerUp has the biggest test suit of any reviewing site I know of with a total of 16 games and 2 synthetic benchmarks, which should give a fairly accurate performance summary.