Reviews - AMD Radeon HD 6790 1GB graphics-card review

[HEXUS]

Marching in to topple GeForce GTX 550 Ti, a new Radeon is released.

Read more.

[Jimbo75]

The card seems to choke with AA, a feature of having only 16 ROPs. The reviews are a bit all over the place, this one is definitely one of the least friendly. THG has it well ahead of the 550 and draws with the 460 768mb. You can see that it's results per game are very variable.

With both this and it's supposed competitor the 550 ti way overpriced, there might not be much incentive for either to drop prices. It's hard to argue with the conclusion, save a few quid more and get a 6850 instead of this.

[scaryjim]

It's the 5830 - and indeed the 4730 - all over again. Why do AMD find it so hard to engineer cards that fit into these middle grounds between its incumbents? This needed to consistently match a 768MB GTX460 and it doesn't. Let's face it, the £100 - £150 gfx segment is already overstuffed, and I'm not sure what AMD hoped to acheive by essentially releasing a 5770 with a 256bit memory interface. It was never likely to set the world on fire, was it...

AMD really need to get the VLIW4 architecture stripped down to the mid-and low-range GPUs

[bear jesus]

It's the 5830 - and indeed the 4730 - all over again. Why do AMD find it so hard to engineer cards that fit into these middle grounds between its incumbents? This needed to consistently match a 768MB GTX460 and it doesn't. Let's face it, the £100 - £150 gfx segment is already overstuffed, and I'm not sure what AMD hoped to acheive by essentially releasing a 5770 with a 256bit memory interface. It was never likely to set the world on fire, was it...

AMD really need to get the VLIW4 architecture stripped down to the mid-and low-range GPUs

It's the same thing as with all those cards, GPU cores that did not meet the standard for the higher level card such as 5850, 6850 are binned to be sold as another product.

This is increasing the overall yield of the barts core's being produced giving AMD better value per wafer and this is the only logical option from a business point of view.

Think about it, there is thousands of cores that just don't meet the spec needed for the higher end version so instead of those chips being a loss they are sold to make lower end cards.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

You can get an HD6790 which uses a single PCI-E power connector for £105:

http://forums.hexus.net/shopping-ret...ry-ebuyer.html

TBH,at this price it is good value for money.

[HalloweenJack]

a few sites are reporting custom pcb maodels are clocking to 1ghz - and *shhhh* with bios mods are unlocking the disabled parts

[Pob255]

It's the 5830 - and indeed the 4730 - all over again. Why do AMD find it so hard to engineer cards that fit into these middle grounds between its incumbents? This needed to consistently match a 768MB GTX460 and it doesn't. Let's face it, the £100 - £150 gfx segment is already overstuffed, and I'm not sure what AMD hoped to acheive by essentially releasing a 5770 with a 256bit memory interface. It was never likely to set the world on fire, was it...

AMD really need to get the VLIW4 architecture stripped down to the mid-and low-range GPUs

I think you mean the 4830

However, yes is basically the same as the other xx30 cards ie "hey we've got a bunch of slightly faulty chips let's mask off the bad sections and put them to use."

And there's always too many cards in the £100-150 range this is one of the key big selling range, you want as wide a range as possible to catch as many as possible sales, also We ourselves are a major factor, even though the 5770 is still a decent card but it's over a year old so many people will just dismiss it out of hand.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I had the HD4830 and it was a great card although it was initially priced too near to the HD4850 at launch.

TBH,the HD6790 at £105 is actually decent value. It is around 15% faster than an HD5770 1GB according to the TPU review and has improved tessellation performance. It is slower than a GTX460 768MB but at the same time is cheaper and probably consumes less power. The cheaper HD5770 1GB cards are around £90 to £100(it seems the £76 HD5770 1GB offer at CCL Computers is no more).

The HD6790 like the HD5770 seems to be able to hit 1GHZ or thereabouts but if the shader unlocking is true then the HD6790 is much better value for money.

[Jimbo75]

I tend to agree. The problem in this review is it really didn't work well with Tarinder's benchmarks, but that's the luck of the draw with these kind of cards.

It's a better card than the 550 Ti in just about every other game.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I tend to agree. The problem in this review is it really didn't work well with Tarinder's benchmarks, but that's the luck of the draw with these kind of cards.

It's a better card than the 550 Ti in just about every other game.

I tend not to look at final ratings but I just realised that Hexus rated the GTX550TI higher than the HD6790!

TBH,the performance of the HD6790 in certain games mirrors that of the HD6850. An example is in SC2 where the GTX550TI is faster than an HD6850 1GB at 1920X1080. However,in the two DX11 games tested the GTX550TI is significantly slower.