AMD Radeon HD 6790

Class mainstream graphic cards have always been the choice of those who didn’t have enough money for paying substantial amounts on recent appearances. As the new element costs in addition, many low-budget gamers have opted for models of mainstream category or even entry-level. AMD Radeon HD 6790 can now be found on U.S. market at a price of 149 dollars, a choice that has to be taken into account for those who want performance without a substantial financial effort.

HD 6790 video card is identical to the HD 6870 at first glance. Thus, we can observe an aesthetical aspect that is very simple, with straight lines and which can attract the attention only by the lack of logos of any kind.

AMD has taken this decision because of the high frequencies that the board has, the three phases and only one PCI-Express power that has HD 6850 and which may have been the limit. AMD Radeon HD 6790 has the same length and appearance as the traditional HD 6870. The back-panel contains two DVI connectors, a 1.4 HDMI connector and two Display Port 1.2 mini connectors, which can support up to three monitors each, using the daisy- chaining procedure. The cooling system is turbine type, evacuating the air directly outside the housing. The solid copper base takes the heat generated by the core and forwards it to the aluminum slides with the help of three heat pipes. An aluminum plate covers almost the entire surface of the video card and takes the heat generated by the memories and VRM for better reliability over time.

Although the core Barts LE used in this case is identical to the Barts Pro or XT, the stream units are not only in the BIOS disabled but are physically cut (laser cut). Radeon HD 6790 has a single Crossfire connector; therefore we cannot achieve such configurations with more than two boards. This reminds us that we are talking of a mainstream board, so no wonder there is also an aired PCB. The PCB’s design is identical to that of the HD 6870 and for the supply of the GPU being endowed with four phases based on the architecture of DriverMOS. They contain both switching transistors (upper and lower) and also the necessary part for commands. The controller is made by Chil Semiconductor, the precise model being CHL8214 and the GDDR5 memory used are produced by Hynix.<

The new video card is not practical than a reduction in the number of processing units, from 1120 as it has HD 6870 (or 960 for HD 6850), to 800. This video card has 800 stream processors, 16 ROP's and 40 texture units. The GPU reaches 840 MHz and the memory, 1 GB GDDR5 on 256-bit has 4200 MHz frequency and all culminating in a processing power of 1.34 TFLOPS. Although 6790 is a video card that has emerged to directly confront the 550, it manages to get a score very close to that obtained by the GTX 460, a superior GPU to GTX 550. As a conclusion, in terms of performance, AMD Radeon HD 6790 is one of the best choices at this time.

Posted in: Computer Hardware