PowerColor TurboDuo HD7790 Pro Reviews

There are a lot of things that we liked about the PowerColor Radeon HD 7790 TurboDuo, and several others that we did not like about it. The video card itself is well built. It comes with a 7.5% factory overclock that puts its operating speed at 1075MHz, equal to the other custom Radeon HD 7790 video cards on the market. PowerColor's overclocking support was poor, with its software in desperate need of an update. You will have to rely on a third party to overclock this video card. After deciding on an overclocking utility, the process is relatively easy and will improve performance enough to enable more graphics options. With a few easy graphics setting tweaks, we were able to play through 6 of today's more demanding video games at enjoyable and stable framerates. We did not have any issue with the TurboDuo cooling system while playing. First, we were unhindered by excess sound. The highest fan speed recorded was only 39%. This means that we have an option to manually increase fan speeds if we need to exhaust excess heat. The 64c temperature was just about right for the relaxed fan speeds. There are two factors keeping this video card from an award from us. First is the board only supports 1GB of memory. It is not very future proof. For instance, any graphics options that have a heavy utilization of VRAM will most likely need to be turned down at 1080p. Having a 2GB of memory will help, as it did with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost.

Gigabyte's £125 HD 7790 OC is decent in most regards but doesn't stand out in any one area. PowerColor's £120 HD 7790 Turbo Duo has better cooling and overclocks just a tad more, but the best of the bunch, from a purely product perspective, is the Sapphire, which has the best cooling, lowest temperatures and better-configured outputs. Trouble is, it costs £130 and, as a consequence of close pricing of other, better GPUs, is also difficult to recommend.

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 in some titles, you might have to go easy on anti-aliasing levels, or reduce details slightly for the best gaming experience. PowerColor's HD 7790 Turbo Duo comes with a GPU overclock out of the box, which is good for a 3% performance improvement over the reference design. Unlike other cards tested today, the memory is not overclocked, which would have been nice. Overclocking our card worked well, but was not as good as with the Sapphire HD 7790 Dual-X. Real-life performance improvement after overclocking turned out to be 10%, which certainly is worth it, especially on this card, because it helps make up for the missing memory overclock. Unfortunately, voltage control is not possible at this time because all cards use a new voltage controller that is incompatible with current overclocking software. AMD has promised an updated SDK that adds voltage control for Bonaire in the future. It's nice to see a little heatsink on the voltage regulators, which is a nice treat, even though I don't think such cooling is absolutely necessary.

PowerColor's HD 7790 Turbo Duo is a factory overclocked card so you already see a bump in performance over a reference design. To go a little further up the performance ladder you only need to push the sliders up in either PowerColor's own PowerUp Tuner or any one of the popular utilities available on the web. Sadly I ran into the same limits I experienced when looking at a competing card: 1200MHz (core) and 1600MHz (memory) were the limits seemingly locked in the vBIOS. It's great to max out the sliders but there seems like so much more is left on the table. I guess everyone can get a piece of the pie pretty easily.