AMD Radeon HD 7790 Review: Graphics Core Next At $150

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After a long and lonely reign, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 Ti is finally being challenged at the $150 price point. Does AMD's Bonaire-based Radeon HD 7790 offer enough performance to put up a fight, or is its familiar GCN architecture too little, too late?

Power And Temperature

First, we'll have a look at power consumption. Note that the numbers I'm presenting subtract the values of a GeForce GT 430 at idle, coming as close as possible to isolating each card's power use.

AMD's new Radeon ties Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 Ti in this metric. Strangely, it beats our Radeon HD 7770 sample by a few watts.

Specifically, we used Crysis 3 for our load measurement, and it's important to remember that the outcome will certainly vary based on the game you're running.

Thermal readings are, of course, determined largely by the effectiveness of a given board's cooler. Sapphire's HD 7790 Dual-X enjoys a unique advantage in this regard, although we're also impressed that a reference GeForce GTX 650 Ti keeps up.

Don Woligroski
Contributor

Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.