Sapphire HD 7790 DUAL-X OC Pro Reviews

Looking at everything, it makes more sense to pick up HD 7790. 1GB or 2GB? I am not sure if it makes any difference, especially for 1080p users, but if it doesn’t, it’s a no brainer to save the cash and grab the 1GB, or see if you can grab Nvidia 660, whatever the current price is during the time you’re this. HD 7790 is better performer than GTX 650 Ti in performance- period. The card also performs better for OpenGL rendering.

Sapphire is one of the first out of the blocks with a retail Radeon HD 7790. Equipped with a quality cooler and clocked in comfortably higher than reference speeds, benchmark numbers indicate solid 1080-resolution performance that, while good for the type of card, still falls well short of Radeon HD 7850 levels. We believe the £120 Radeon HD 7790 GPU is a welcome introduction that plugs the rather large gap previously present between the HD 7770 GHz and HD 7850 GPUs. Pricing needs to gravitate closer to £100 before it becomes a clear winner in its class, mind. AMD perhaps knows this and is offering a BioShock Infinite sweetener as part of the package, redeemable when bought at selected retailers.

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.

A good mid-range card for 1080p gaming, it plays the latest games in high detail settings at smooth frame rates

The AMD Radeon HD 7790 was found to be a solid card for the $150 price point, but NVIDIA has yet to release this cards true competition!

The new Radeon HD 7790 is based on AMD's new Bonaire graphics core, which is an evolutionary step towards to 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 the 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. Sapphire's HD 7790 Dual-X comes with a good increase on clock speeds out of the box. They provide another 5% real-life performance improvement. Overclocking on our card worked amazingly well, reaching 1265 MHz GPU. Much better than the ASUS HD 7790 DC II that we also tested today. Real-life performance improvement after overclocking turned out to be 14.5%, which nearly resulted in HD 7850 performance levels. 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.

AMD's new Radeon HD 7790 is the first Sea Islands GPU to find its way to the channel market and Bonaire proves to be very compelling product in the sub-$200 market that is usually quite crowded. Because of NVIDIA's gap in product that lies between $149 and $230 (GTX 650 Ti to the GTX 660) the Radeon HD 7790 should make a pretty big splash as long as it has that opening. The question is how long NVIDIA will wait to finally address this hole in its lineup that has existed for many months. There are rumors swirling about a possible GTX 650 product with GPU Boost so don't be surprised if you find that on our test bed soon as well. Some discerning readers and hardware enthusiasts will scoff at the apparent "rebranding" of the HD 7000-series hardware into new SKUs, or try to tell you that Sea Islands was supposed to be much more than this kind of product release. When I asked AMD for details on what family Bonaire fell into, PR replied with a somewhat cagey "Sea Islands were ASICs planned for 2013" - implying that this was in the cards the whole time. I find that a bit hard to believe but the current path that AMD's GPU division is taking matches closely with its plans on the APU side - keep the current architecture alive and profitable as long as possible without unnecessary investment in R&D. In both areas, Radeon graphics and A-series APUs, AMD does have some distinct advantages - management has clearly decided to focus on those rather than spending too much on addressing the areas of concern. At least until later.

A high performance FPS beast the Sapphire HD 7790 is not, nor is it meant to be. That being the case the FPS performance it delivered while using upper end settings is pretty impressive, all things considered. In every test run it was faster than the target competitor's card, the GTX 650Ti, at the target price point of $149/159. While running the gaming tests I found the HD 7790 delivered smooth game play with the settings used for my tests. A tangible result when you compare apples to apples. Sapphire equipped the HD 7790 Dual-X with a cooling solution that has so far delivered the lowest temperatures of any card I have recently tested under load where it counts. The idle characteristics provide for a noise free environment but the cost is slightly higher idle temperatures; a fair trade off for the cooling performance delivered. Ramping the fans up to the 4400RPM limit does make them audible but no where near what you would expect from fans running that fast. Even so the noise was more a pleasant drone than a higher pitched wail. During testing the fans never ramp up this high without manual intervention, providing that noise free gaming solution. My one beef with this card is the overclocking abilities. Sure I was able to max out the card as it sits today at 1200MHz (core) and 1600MHz (memory), but nothing higher was capable due to some hard limits in the VBIOS. Sapphire's own utility featured clock speeds higher than the limits, but when applied the clock speed would drop to the last setting under the clock speed limits. Even so free performance is nothing to scoff at but it feels like there is so much more left on the table. For $159, Sapphire delivered with the Dual-X OC. It delivers smooth game play and is cool and quiet. If you need more performance, another Dual-X OC for some Crossfire fun is the prescription for your performance fix. Now get yer frag on!

When compared to other AMD cards, the HD 7790 1GB performs respectably, as it's left roughly in the middle of the cheaper HD 7770 1GB and the costlier HD 7850 2GB. Compared with the GTX 650 Ti 1GB, AMD's HD 7790 1GB doesn't always perform as well as it should, but overall it does emerge as the more powerful card. The main dent in the armour of the HD 7790 1GB, however, is the fact that 1GB SKUs of the HD 7850 are still available for under £130. Sadly, we no longer have our sample and haven't been able to retest it, but at 1,920 x 1,080, this SKU performs almost identically to the 2GB one and it also has excellent overclocking potential too, so it's a real bargain. Sapphire has done little wrong with its iteration of the HD 7790 1GB, as its card has an excellent cooler, good connectivity and a meaningful overclock that can be pushed significantly further if needs be. Pricing is everything at this end of the market, however, and despite Sapphire's efforts the card is currently little competition in this regard compared to an HD 7850 1GB, which remains our card of choice for 1080p gaming. However, we've been advised by AMD that due to low-density GDDR5 modules being discontinued, HD 7850 1GB models are on their way out with them essentially available on a 'while stocks last' basis, so if you're considering the upgrade now would be the time to act.

The HD7790 GPU is a powerful beast for the name it carries as it well exceeds what we have seen from a 7700 series card. I believe with some driver optimizations this card could really wake up to be a greta bang for the buck. The limit to 1GB framebudffer I feel can be an issue on some modern titles but at this level the effect would be neglidgable as your not going to be pushing memory that hard before you run out of GPU. This card is one of those products you need to look at for what it is, It is not a GTX680, or HD7970… It is a mainstream level card built for those who just like to game at medium or high settings and dont need every last bit of eye candy enabled. If I were to build a budget rig for my family and they wanted to do some gaming I could imagine this card could be a good performance budget option, you just have to remember when you get to this level of card you have to know what you plan to play and know its limits out of the gate or you could end up disappointed. I hope that AMD will loosen the strings a little on the overclocking headroom as even at out of the box clocks you are almost maxed on GPU and are maxed on memory.