Power, temps and noise
The three HD 7790 OC cards feature near-identical frequencies. This means that gaming benchmark performance was always likely to be very similar. Perhaps we'll see the cards differentiate themselves in the power, temperature and acoustic tests.
We've omitted the standard AMD Radeon HD 7790 because it's a downclocked version of the Gigabyte card and not a retail product in its own right. The Bonaire die is good with respect to power consumption; the entire system only pulls 130W at the wall, but there's scant little to differentiate the three cards here.
Here we go. Sapphire's larger cooler paves the way for the lowest HD 7790 OC temperatures, but do understand that a GPU running at, say, 75°C poses no long-term problems. What we need to do is examine the relationship between card temperatures and noise.
Sapphire's card is also the quietest, though we'd say, subjectively speaking, that anything below 40dB is acceptable for a mainstream PC. Interestingly, the large Gigabyte fan produces a noise that, to our ears, is far more noticeable than the louder GeForce GTX 660; sometimes decibel ratings don't reveal all.
