AMD's Radeon HD 6790: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on April 5, 2011 12:01 AM ESTThe Test
For the AMD lineup including the 6790, we’re using the Catalyst 11.4 preview driver. For NVIDIA’s lineup we’re using a mix of the release 265 and release 270 drivers – we’re using 270 for the GTX 550 and GTX 460 768MB, however if you’re familiar with the performance of these cards you’ll quickly notice that the performance in our test suite is identical to the release 265 drivers.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6990 AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 6790 AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5830 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 4870X2 AMD Radeon HD 4870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 262.99 NVIDIA ForceWare 266.58 NVIDIA ForceWare 270.51 Beta AMD Catalyst 10.10e AMD Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix AMD Catalyst 11.4 Preview |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
69 Comments
View All Comments
SquattingDog - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
"it's LEANING from the past..." should be it's LEARNING from the past. Otherwise a great article, very speedily put out. Looks to be an interesting card, depending on what pricing it is available at here. Of course the 6850/6870 are much better and the 6850 looks to be better bang for buck, but when people cannot squeeze a few extra bucks out of the wallet, it should be pretty reasonable. Especially once the GTX460s are out of circulation, which is bound to happen soon enough.Glad to see more competition and finally some products reaching further down in the retail sector not just OEM from AMD.
ZL1Corvette - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
2nd to last page possible typo:"Last but not least as always is our look at the power consumption, temperatures, and acoustics of the GTX 550 Ti."
Did you mean 6970?
ZL1Corvette - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
See, we all make mistakes. I meant 6790.stm1185 - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
800 Stream Procs, 40 Texture Units, 16 ROPs, 256 bit memory bus. Only the 6970 has a 840mhz clock compared to 750 mhz, and 1050mhz on the memory compared to 900mhz on the 4870.My card has held up well it seems.
james.jwb - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
I have a 4890 with a 2560x1440 screen, and to my surprise, i can play quite a few games at 30fps, and most older ones at 60+fps. Like F1 2010, around 50fps.What a card, eh?
WhatsTheDifference - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
hello. nice card. I play everything at 19x12 with my 4890 (in this case, an msi cyclone soc) with never a problem of any kind. it bloodies the 285's face.kind of a wondrous thing, then, that anandtech.com has banned the 4980 from all benchmarks...ain't it? XD
B3an - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 - link
*rolls eyes* ... They dont have any 2xx series here either. The ATI 4xxx and NV 2xx series do not belong here.If you want to see how your 4890 stacks up simply go the the GPU Bench page to compare.
WhatsTheDifference - Saturday, April 9, 2011 - link
what would you say these are, at least at first sight?NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216
and
AMD Radeon HD 4870X2
AMD Radeon HD 4870
......?
please make your way to 'index' and 'the test'. or, maybe I'm confusing articles.
now adding the always-juvenile *rolls eyes*
pandemonium - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
Gotta take the bad with that good though.Both the 4870 and 4870x2 run much hotter and take a butt load more power to produce lower framerates. And the 4870 was never a lower tier card by any means. Plus, no DX11 support on the 4870. Not that it's incredibly important, but just another note.
I'd say this is a good example of hardware evolution.
edpierce - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
I disagree. Recent video card innovations have been real unimpressive lately. It really does seem like we are not much further than 3 years ago in terms of visual video card performance. Are we hitting a massive roadblock here?