Final thoughts and rating

AMD's release of the Radeon HD 6790 marks the introduction of the cheapest 6000-series GPU for the retail market.

Launched as a mid-range card and designed to slot in to the gap between 18-month-old Radeon HD 5770 and the impressive Radeon HD 6850, AMD's new GPU arrives with a retail price of £120.

It would be sensible to assume that HD 6790 is a brand-new design, given the model nomenclature, and has been brought in with a small die and energy efficiency very much to the fore.

But the new Radeon appears to be the product of AMD salvaging not-quite-perfect HD 6850 and HD 6870 GPUs - intrinsically faster models - and reusing them here. An upshot of such an approach results in an architecture that's fairly potent in some respects but lacking in others, particularly in regards to back-end processing and power-draw.

Performance, as expected, falls between a Radeon HD 5770 and HD 6850, though it's closer to the last-generation GPU. Looking across to NVIDIA, Radeon HD 6790 is competitive against the also-new GTX 550 Ti, and this may be AMD's express aim with this introduction.

But basing a new card on what seem to be recycled cores means power-draw is high, more so than the faster HD 6850. So while this is very much a release targeted for a particular price point, AMD's method of achieving this positioning leaves a lot to be desired.

The only saving grace is the excellent overclocking potential exhibited by the Sapphire card, but it's not enough to make the Radeon HD 6790 stand out, or even be noticed, in exalted mid-range company.

We'd recommend folk pony up the extra £15 for the Radeon HD 6850, for it's just a plain better GPU. The same can be said for the GeForce GTX 460 1GB, now available from £120.

Much like the Radeon HD 5830 from early 2010, the AMD Radeon HD 6790 feels like a stopgap between genuine mid-range and high-end GPU architectures. We wait for the 'real' Radeon HD 6790 to show up soon.

The Good

Fills an obvious hole in AMD's GPU stack
Overclocks well

The Bad

An 'ugly' architecture, particularly from a power-draw viewpoint
Radeon HD 6850 is a considerably better GPU

HEXUS. rating

AMD/Sapphire Radeon HD 6790 1GB

HEXUS Where2Buy

TBC.

HEXUS Right2Reply

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The card seems to choke with AA, a feature of having only 16 ROPs. The reviews are a bit all over the place, this one is definitely one of the least friendly. THG has it well ahead of the 550 and draws with the 460 768mb. You can see that it's results per game are very variable.

With both this and it's supposed competitor the 550 ti way overpriced, there might not be much incentive for either to drop prices. It's hard to argue with the conclusion, save a few quid more and get a 6850 instead of this.

It's the 5830 - and indeed the 4730 - all over again. Why do AMD find it so hard to engineer cards that fit into these middle grounds between its incumbents? This needed to consistently match a 768MB GTX460 and it doesn't. Let's face it, the £100 - £150 gfx segment is already overstuffed, and I'm not sure what AMD hoped to acheive by essentially releasing a 5770 with a 256bit memory interface. It was never likely to set the world on fire, was it… :O_o1:

AMD really need to get the VLIW4 architecture stripped down to the mid-and low-range GPUs

scaryjim
It's the 5830 - and indeed the 4730 - all over again. Why do AMD find it so hard to engineer cards that fit into these middle grounds between its incumbents? This needed to consistently match a 768MB GTX460 and it doesn't. Let's face it, the £100 - £150 gfx segment is already overstuffed, and I'm not sure what AMD hoped to acheive by essentially releasing a 5770 with a 256bit memory interface. It was never likely to set the world on fire, was it… :O_o1:

AMD really need to get the VLIW4 architecture stripped down to the mid-and low-range GPUs

It's the same thing as with all those cards, GPU cores that did not meet the standard for the higher level card such as 5850, 6850 are binned to be sold as another product.

This is increasing the overall yield of the barts core's being produced giving AMD better value per wafer and this is the only logical option from a business point of view.

Think about it, there is thousands of cores that just don't meet the spec needed for the higher end version so instead of those chips being a loss they are sold to make lower end cards.