Last month we presented Radeon HD 6790, a pretty accessible solution for gamers who don’t have a lot of money at disposal. AMD released this model with the desire to add a product to their gamma which would simultaneously be both stronger than Radeon HD 5770 and weaker than HD 6850, but also a direct competitor to GeForce GTX 550. They fulfilled this task well, as the price was perfectly positioned even on local markets, the way it was supposed to be. However, certain models, produced by the so-called “premium” partners, had a rather high price for this card, around 130€. This wouldn’t be such a big problem if HD 6850 wasn’t a mere 10€ more expensive, which rendered HD 6790 unnecessary in the value for money segment.
PowerColor has made a fantastic move by offering their version of HD 6790 at a lower price, hitting the market with a tag of about 110€, which makes it more than interesting for gamers on a budget.
PowerColor HD 6790 arrives in a humble packaging, covering only the most basic of elements, without any particular extras. While understandable, we still don’t like the fact that the manufacturer has decided to completely omit the CrossFireX bridge, as it can’t have been that expensive to include, while potentially limiting further upgrade possibilities. After removal from the packaging, you’ll be greeted by a card that’s entirely redesigned and doesn’t look like the referent model at all. The graphics card is dominated by a large plastic shield, coloured matte black, with a large fan in the middle. Beneath the cover, there’s a large aluminium cooling profile with a thick fin design. In order to transfer heat from the graphics processor to the rest of the cooling body as efficiently as possible, the cooler is intersected by three copper heatpipes, which are entirely up to the task. The cooling base is made of aluminium and is of quite decent finish, although we believe that it would’ve been a more efficient solution for the heatpipes to lie directly on the GPU.
Below the cooler, we’ve been able to find the non-referent red PCB. On it, a bit off from the centre, is the Barts LE GPU. This GPU is made in TSMC’s 40 nm production process, just like other Barts chips. The weakened Barts has 800 stream processors, as well as 16 ROP and 40 texture units. This is four SIMD engines less than the full Barts, with the clock set at an expected 840 MHz. Just like all new AMD chips, this one also supports DirectX 11, ShaderModel 5.0 and OpenGL 4.1. Owing to the third generation of UVD, this card, as well as all others from the same family, has excellent video acceleration capabilities. Eyefinity is present as well, and this model is, like most others from the series, capable of displaying image on up to three monitors. As far as connections are concerned, this card requires an additional 6-pin molex to be connected for extra power supply, and there’s a single connector left for CrossFireX as well, so that you can add another card in the future and increase performance. The choice of video outputs is a bit poor in this particular model, probably to save on production costs, but this is unlikely to impact your choice anyway. Anyway, you have HDMI 1.4, DisplayPort and DVI at disposal, which covers the vast majority of users.
