Review (PowerColor) AMD Radeon HD 6790: Affordable yet Powerful

Released last March with an MSRP of US$ 150, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti is targeted at budget-conscious gamers looking for an affordable graphics card to play games with. After almost a month in the market with no direct competitor (at least in the form of recent offering from NVIDIA’s archrival, ATI/ AMD), it is now challenged by the Radeon HD 6790.

AMD’s Radeon HD 6790 occupies a price point similar to the GTX 550 Ti and, according to AMD’s own claims, should perform better than its GeForce adversary. In this article, we’ll try to prove if that is really the case!

AMD HD 6790

Specification

Radeon HD 6790 uses the new “Barts LE” GPU from AMD, a third derivative of the original Barts architecture first used on the Radeon HD 6870 (Barts XT) and Radeon HD 6950 *Barts Pro). As we can see, with its reduced technical prowess, the Radeon HD 6790 sits below its HD 6800 cousins, but well above the HD 5770 which should remain in AMD’s current lineups until another series 6 derivative eventually replaces it.

Compared to its higher-end siblings, the Radeon HD 6790 has fewer Streaming Multiprocessor clusters (10, versus 14 on the HD 6870 and 12 on the HD 6850). That also reduces the amount of Stream Processors and ROPs to 800 and 16, respectively, putting it closer to the GTX 550 Ti specs wise. The memory bandwidth, however, remains at 256-bit.

Interestingly enough, in terms of technical specification, the “Barts LE” GPU is similar to the “Juniper XT” used on the Radeon HD 5770. The most significant difference between those two is the larger memory bandwidth on the HD 6790. How does that going to affect the performance? We’ll find that out later on in our performance testing session.

AMD HD 6790, Features

Here’s a list of Radeon HD 6790’s highlighted features. For more detail on these, you can read our previous

• Microsoft DirectX 11support
• AMD HD3D
• AMD Eyefinity
• AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) Technology
• AMD CrossfireX Technology
• AMD PowerPlay Technology
• Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA)
• Bitstreaming Audio
• Universal Video Decoder 3.0
• PCI Express 2.1 x16
• Dual-Link DVI
• HDMI 1.4a
• Display Port 1.2

PowerColor HD 6790

Our first Radeon HD 6790 sample came from Power Color. This particular card operates at reference-standard clocks. But, we found only one, PCIe 6-pin power connector instead of two, which suggests that Power Color uses its own PCB design for this product.