Sapphire's take
That means a couple of 6-pin PCIe connectors located underneath a card-wide heatsink. Sapphire changes the reference radial fan for a slower-spinning axial model. While the overall cooling is smaller, the card retains a two-slot profile.
Equipped with the same 840MHz core and 4,200MHz memory speeds of the reference card, together with a standard 1GB frame-buffer, Sapphire has intimated that this particular board will run at significantly higher speeds. Just don't point your browsers to page 16 just yet, though.
Another change lies with the video outputs on the back. The Sapphire version has both varieties of DVI - single- and dual-link - but changes up by providing a full-size DisplayPort connector as well as a regular HDMI (v1.4a). Currently, we believe this layout is a better bet for most users.
Our belief is that Sapphire is choosing not-quite-perfect HD 6870 boards and qualifying them for HD 6790 usage. Should this be so (Sapphire's coy about verifying this fact) the possibility of a BIOS flash to a faster card remains.
The firm reckons this HD 6790 is set to retail for £120 or so, which, really, puts it rather too close to an HD 6850. Anyway, let's speed on to the benchmarks.
