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
129 Comments Comment from the forums
  • johnsonjohnson
    I thought the HD 7850 1GB is good value at $150 after rebate and 2GB at $180 after rebate.
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    Its crazy to see how much performance you can get in $150. The HD7790 performs 90% of the 6870, which menas its almost equal to a HD5870 :O , which was the top chip a few years back.
    Reply
  • nukemaster
    Very good performance for the price.

    Its a good time to build mid end systems :)
    Reply
  • Nintendo Maniac 64
    Too bad the OpenGL benches weren't implemented before Tom's did that "Gaming on workstation GPUs" article...
    Reply
  • amdfangirl
    I guess I know what my next GPU will be.

    6870 performance in a 85W envelope is amazing.
    Reply
  • rdc85
    It really strong rival for 650Ti....

    Glad to see some competition at entry/budget level card.....
    Reply
  • vmem
    wow, nice job AMD...

    and perhaps they finally realized that they make crappy reference coolers at best and just let Sapphire go ahead and ship to Tom's lol. In all honesty, as an AMD exclusive partner, Sapphire should just go ahead and take over reference cooler design for AMD, they make some awesome stuff
    Reply
  • blazorthon
    amdfangirlI guess I know what my next GPU will be. 85W TDP... basically = to a HD 5870... I can't believe it...I'll get the 2GB and finally be able to play Skyrim 1080p w/high res textures xD.
    IDK about it at that point. High-res stuff and all that can eat through poor memory bandwidth cards such as this quite easily.
    Reply
  • vmem
    amdfangirlI guess I know what my next GPU will be. 85W TDP... basically = to a HD 5870... I can't believe it...I'll get the 2GB and finally be able to play Skyrim 1080p w/high res textures xD.
    Honestly, if you put on enough high res mods, even my 7970 barely keeps up... still a gorgeous game tho, and you'll enjoy it just fine with a little tweaking and a 7790
    Reply
  • blazorthon
    Well, it seems to not hold up quite to the 90% of a 7850 rumors, but it's at a respectable ~80% of it on average. For $150, that is definitely a great competitor.
    Reply