AMD Radeon HD 6790 Review - PAGE 1

Since the launch of the Northern Islands graphics cards, AMD has filled the market with high-end and mid-range graphics cards that were based on either the Barts or Cayman GPU. AMD also catered to the lower-end market with graphics cards such as the HD 6770 and HD 6750. With the recently released of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti, there was a hole in AMD's lineup that needed to be filled. To close all the gaps and ensure they have a high performance graphics card that competes at the $150 price point, AMD is releasing the latest graphics card from the Northern Islands series – the HD 6790.

The HD 6790 uses a variant of the Barts GPU dubbed the "Barts LE". This new core includes 800 Stream processors that are organized in 10 streaming multiprocessor units, which gives the core two blocks of 400 Steam Processors with each block having a dispatch unit. In addition, the reference Barts LE core is clocked at 840MHz and includes 40 Texture units, 16 ROPs and a compute power of 1.34 TFLOPs. This should give it an impressive performance for an entry-level graphics cards, but AMD has also ensured the HD 6790 will not be limited by its memory sub-system by giving the card a 1GB frame buffer with a 256-bit interface.

By increasing the memory bandwidth, the HD 6790 should not only perform better than other similarly priced graphics cards but also scale better at higher resolutions. According to AMD, the sweet spot for this card is really found in resolutions up to 1080p.

The HD 6790 is designed to offer excellent gaming performance at a price that won't break the bank, and for this reason AMD has set the launch MSRP to $149. This places the HD 6790 directly between the HD 6850 and HD 5770, and sets it up to go head to head with the GTX 550 Ti. So, it should be interesting to see which card comes out on top. Both feature strong internal specifications for their market position, and also have a robust memory interface. Along with the Barts LE core and 256-bit memory bus, the HD 6790 also includes full support for AMD’s latest technologies such as Eyefinity and HD3D

Also, a last minute surprise showed up at the Neoseeker labs in the form a Sapphire HD 6790. With less than 12 hours to go before launch it was a race against time to get it into the launch review,  but we managed to do it in time, and we even got ourselves CrossFire numbers to boot!