XFX FX-779A-CDB4 Pro Reviews

The XFX Radeon HD 7790 Black Edition with 2GB of memory is not currently available in e-tail, but carries a suggested retail price of $169.99. Availability is an issue right now, but once these units are filled, the XFX 7790 Black Edition 2GB represents the highest-end of Radeon HD 7790 based video cards. It carries with it a respectable factory overclock, exceptional cooling, and enthusiast level overclocking potential. XFX has done a great job producing a high-end Radeon HD 7790 based video card. This is one of the best that we've had on our test bench. The problem for XFX, and AMD alike, is that the Radeon HD 7790 is an under-powered GPU compared to the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. Even at $169.99, the XFX Radeon HD 7790 Black Edition 2GB is a bit overpriced, when compared to the performance you can get out of a GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB cards are available in e-tail for as little as $159.99 before a $10 mail in rebate. Considering pricing, no matter how well built and tricked out a Radeon HD 7790 based card is, these are simply not a good value for your hard earned dollars after being steamrolled by the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost based video card. This isn't XFX's fault, XFX has done a great job producing a well made, high-end Radeon HD 7790 based video card. It is simply that these GPUs are slower, and priced higher than these should be, in comparison to NVIDIA's extremely well priced and performing GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. If you are in the market for a Radeon HD 7790 based video card, look closely at what XFX offers, these are solid cards, and will give you a great HD 7790 experience. Just keep in mind, you can actually get more performance, at the same price, if you look over at the competition. It is an option that cannot be ignored.

XFX looks to invigorate the mid-range graphics card market by releasing a Radeon HD 7790 equipped with a 2GB framebuffer. In an industry where bigger still tends to mean better, it's a good marketing move that, based on our findings, doesn't provide any performance benefit over cheaper cards with a standard 1GB framebuffer. And adding extra memory inevitably pushes up cost. At the time of writing, the reviewed card costs £145, or over £30 more than XFX's very own Core Series 1GB clocked in at the same speeds. We've repeated ad nauseam that it's good to see companies try something different and push the boat out some. Unfortunately for XFX, cool and quiet as the Black Edition Overclocked 2GB is, it becomes hard to recommend in a market where more powerful cards are available for the same outlay.

The HD7790 GPU has proven itself as quite a powerful GPU offering with more clock potential than AMD wants to give it. That is in no way the board partner’s fault and therefore we cannot penalize the cards for it. But it is worth noting that AMD could have one hell of a fun overclocking monster on its hand if they would just let it off its chain here. XFX build one very nice and solid card with the aluminum shrouded cooler and uber quiet fans it makes itself into a card that looks like a million bucks without costing that. The quality is excellent as normally on mainstream card of this level. This is somewhat surprising as most of these cards are built as cheaply as allowable. We are very happy to see XFX taking the quality feel so seriously on a mainstream model as it just adds to a better user experience overall. The choice of higher end board level components means that overall the lifespan of the card is much higher or likely to be higher with higher end components to keep problems at bay and keep things running more smoothly. Overall XFX took a lower level midrange card, polished it like a diamond and made it have the body of a supercar so even the most entry uses can have one hell of a nice card in their right with the fit and finish normally reserved for the elite.

Overall, I think that the XFX Radeon HD R7790 is a good deal for a video card somewhere between entry level and mid-range. The fact is you'll have to turn down the settings on any of the more demanding titles to get playable frame rates. For just a little more investment, you can pull a few more FPS and get an extra free game. The only "wow" that I got from the R7790 was the cooling. I was very impressed. The cooling system appears to have worked exactly as advertised and I was impressed by that. Other than that, however, nothing about this card jumped out at me. Performance across HD 7790s is likely to be close to the same based on the clock speed and RAM, so simply tuning a card isn't enough anymore. A manufacturer really has to woo the gamer or enthusiast with something extra features to make their specific component stand out. Give me a tuning utility or some in-game recording software. Heck, bundle FRAPS or GPU-Z with your logo on it to give me a warm fuzzy. I need something. I did notice that the XFXforce.com website had a Black Edition Members section to it, but it looks like there is nothing there yet. It tells you to register using the form below, but there is no form. Something like that would be a great feature to lure us in. As it is, I can only give the R7790 exactly what it deserves, a good, slightly-higher-than-average score.

On the whole the HD 7790 delivers pretty good performance for just 120 euro. We should bear in mind that it sits halfway between low-end and mid-range cards, so we shouldn’t expect too much in terms of performance. Judging by our tests, the HD 7790 is sufficient for gaming on resolutions up to 1680x1050, with high detail settings and antialiasing. At 1080p it is still possible to have some fun, but with less antialiasing and details. Even at 1080p it is possible to achieve a good balance between performance and quality, which is very good news for gamers on a tight budget. XFX Black Edition cards traditionally pack only the best GPUs and another thing we should take into consideration is the high quality cooler. The GPU is factory overclocked from 1000MHz to 1075MHz, which is nothing spectacular. Then again we believe this is AMD’s doing, as all AIBs decided to overclock their HD 7790 cards to 1075MHz. The factory overclock did not result in any noteworthy performance gains, but once we tried tinkering with the clocks we managed to hit 1260MHz for the GPU and 1700MHz for the memory.

The new Radeon HD 7790 is based on AMD's new Bonaire graphics core, which is an evolutionary step towards new GPU technology. It uses more shaders and a new dynamic clock algorithm that promises higher performance than AMD's original PowerTune Boost. In our testing, we see nice performance results that sit right in-between the HD 7770 GHz Edition and HD 7850. This makes the HD 7790 capable of full-HD 1080p gaming, but you might have to go easy on anti-aliasing levels or reduce details slightly for the best gaming experience with some titles. XFX has overclocked both GPU and memory on their card, which provides a 6% real-life performance boost over the reference design. They also doubled the amount of video memory from 1 GB to 2 GB, which does not make a significant difference for a card in this performance class. We do see some improvements at 2560x1600 in Far Cry 3, and I expect to see similar improvements in Crysis 3, but the HD 7790 is really not capable of 2560x1600 gaming, no matter the amount of VRAM. Our test suite showed no improvements at 1920x1200 and below, which is the expected result for such a memory size. However, XFX not asking a price premium for the extra memory does make sense to me because more memory does have a psychological effect that draws buyers to these cards (no matter if it makes sense or not).

Over the past few years XFX's Black Edition cards have been proven to deliver excellent performance and longevity based on the design characteristics built into the brand. To start with XFX uses GPU Edging to bin the cores so that they go over not only the factory overclock but have some additional headroom built in for the enthusiast or gamer looking for a bit more FPS from the card. This ensures that the end user that chooses the Black Edition card gets that extra bit of performance. To that end I was able to squeeze another 175MHz out of the core and another 100MHz out of the 1GB of GDDR5 memory for final as tested clock speeds of 1251MHz on the Bonaire core and 1700MHz from the Hynix GDDR5. The increased clock speed offered measurable improvements in performance throughout the entire test suite. XFX uses its Duratec suite on the Black Edition cards that include solid capacitors and dust free fans on the Double Dissipation cooling solution. The Double Dissipation cooling solution with Ghost thermal technology is part of the package. The dust proof fans improve longevity by using multiple seal points to hinder dust intrusion into the motor windings. The shroud is open to promote additional cooling to the memory and board components. A dual heat pipe-equipped heat sink is used to channel the thermal load from the Bonaire core to the aluminum fin array. When compared to the solution used on the comparison card I feel the smaller heat pipes are the difference in the cooling performance when clocked similarly. Even so the margin while overclocked is a scant two degrees. Fan noise is non existent with the card managing the fan profile when sealed up in the chassis. It does become audible when manually ramping up the fan speed but is far from being obnoxiously loud. Comparing power consumption results shows that XFX has a little more work to do to get the power consumption down in line with comparable HD 7790 models.