Introducing AMD’s HD 6790
Overclocking, noise and power usage
We easily overclocked our HD 6790 from 840MHz to 960MHz on the core. Unfortunately, our ambient temperatures rose into the 80sF as an unusual early Spring heat wave hit our local high-desert testing lab and we backed down the overclock to 940MHz where it proved to be rock solid. Playing with the memory clocks were a bit more tricky as we could get higher clocks than we settled on, but the performance results were not consistent so we settled on a bump to 1200MHz (from 1050MHz).
Noise
The HD 6790 has about the same or a bit more fan noise than the EVGA GTX 550 Ti which we also judged slightly quieter in comparison to the Radeon HD 5770 which is already a very quiet card. You are never aware of any of these cards during gaming even when they spin up under load – even if you are listening for their fan’s noise. However, it also doesn’t matter what the HF 6790’s reference fan sounds like because the partners are not going to use AMD’s engineering sample design that we tested anyway.
This power draw section is unfinished. We plan to add numbers later. Basically, the numbers are very close overall and are in the same class in power draw and thermals. Both cards are very close; although the HD 6790 uses a bit more power than the HD 5770, it draws a bit less than the GTX 550 Ti.
I still think that 6790 is the 5830 of its generation. Too many cuts leads to a crippled chip that exists only because AMD marketing wanted to sell you a chip that would otherwise be thrown in the trash bin because it had too many defects to pass as a 68xx/69xx. That might be good marketing but it’s not a good deal for the buyer.
Beating the GTX 550 is an accomplishment, sure, but not much of one, since the 550 is such a garbage card to begin with.
If you’ve got $150 to spend on a video card, just save up and buy a 6950 for $250. That extra $100 has a great deal of marginal value. As opposed to, say the $150 delta between a GTX 570 and 580, which is just like throwing money away.
This generation of GPUs at 40 nm has been rather underwhelming on the whole. No true spiritual successor to the 8800 GT from either the red or green team. And with DX 11 adoption at a virtual trickle, thanks to the negative effects of consolization, it would appear that progress will be slow until the next-generation of consoles appears.
Bring on 28 nm.
On the bright side, another great review by ABT.
100% agreed with above comment!
Well, I’d say that GTX 460 1GB is almost like the 8800GT of its time, but only if you could find one for $150 with rebates.
Both companies are desperately trying to keep the prices up. Now, a $500 GTX 580 is starting to look a bit “mediocre” with some recent games like Metro 2033, Mafia 2, etc.. The price to pay for eye candy on the PC is rather high, and many games are console ports from consoles that are “several” years old, or a few PC generations behind.
I find it to be really misleading when AMD claims that the 6790 has 256-bit memory when the sawed-off ROPs limit access to only half of the available bandwidth, as the card behaves exactly like as if it has 128-bit bus. For more on this, if you want to discuss on the forums here, I started a thread: http://alienbabeltech.com/abt/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=22733
I also believe that all Barts GPU’s are VLIW4-based like the rest of Northern Islands. It’s something else that appears to be in a dimly-lit area.. when one shines a candle in that area, something just doesn’t look right.