ASUS HD7790-DC2OC-1GD5 Pro Reviews

We come away from the Radeon HD 7790 feeling that it could, or needs to be, a bit faster. Sure, it provides a large improvement over the Radeon HD 7770, but it only reaches the platau the competition was already at within $150. It is an upgrade from a Radeon HD 7770, or 7750, but it is not an upgrade from a GeForce GTX 650 Ti. Perhaps driver improvements will take it to the top, but we can only evaluate it on the merrits it is currently performing at. It won't take much from NVIDIA to take the crown back at $150, if it so chooses. The Radeon HD 7790 is good at providing better performance than the Radeon HD 7770, and now at $150 it is the AMD video card to buy. Certainly, it provides a lot of performance at a small price. We also have to understand, it can't reach the toes of the Radeon HD 7850, AMD still has to think about where that sits in the market and it can't have the HD 7790 overtaking the HD 7850. ASUS has done a solid job constructing a video card around the Radeon HD 7790. The ASUS Radeon HD 7790 DirectCU II OC provides ASUS's unique DirectCU II heatsink and fan combination, which we love, it really works and keeps the GPU as cool as possible. It is silent, and won't bother you while gaming. There is also overclocking potential out of this video card and GPU. ASUS has built the video card to take advantage of overclocking for enthusiasts to get the most out of the HD 7790. In fact, we urge enthusiasts to overclock the HD 7790 because then you'll really be getting the most for your money, and the HD 7790 benefits more from overclocking than the HD 7770 did.

It's a shame that the 7790 didn't come out a few months ago, when it would have been very welcome at these price points. However, the 650 Ti Boost, despite being marginally more expensive, gives superior value for money. It's appreciably faster in every area, and also wins in terms of clock speeds and memory bandwidth. You can save yourself around £20 by buying the standard version of the 7790, but if we had around £150 spend, we'd find it hard to justify a 7790.

An excellent graphics card, but it’s not quite as good value as Sapphire’s version

The HD 7790 is an enticing around-$150 video card for playing today's games at high detail settings in 1080p. Those with more to spend, though, should consider Nvidia's latest GeForce alternative or AMD's superior Radeon HD 7850.

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 the anti-aliasing levels, or reduce details slightly for the best gaming experience. The ASUS HD 7790 DC II OC comes with a good out-of-the-box increase on clock speeds. They provide a 5% real-life performance improvement. 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. It would have been nice to see a VRM heatsink like on the Sapphire HD 7790, which also has cooling for the memory chips, since both probably help a bit with overclocking. Unfortunately, voltage control is not possible at this time. All cards use a new voltage controller that is incompatible with current overclocking software, but AMD has, for the future, promised an updated SDK that adds voltage control for Bonaire.

Based on AMD's Bonaire GPU, the Asus Direct CU II Radeon HD 7790 is a great budget graphics card, driving a great price/performance ratio and stronger game experiences.