AMD Radeon HD 7790 Review Feat. Sapphire: The First Desktop Sea Islands
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Sapphire
- GCN
- Radeon HD 7000
The Test
For today’s review we will be using the latest rendition of our game benchmark suite, first introduced in our review of the GeForce GTX Titan. We still expect to add another 1-2 games to this suite in April after the last of the major Spring game releases hit next week. As a reminder, our 2013 benchmark suite is much more 1080p centric on the low-end, as 1080p sales have eclipsed even cheaper, lower resolution monitors. As AMD is promoting the 7790 as an entry-level 1080p card anyhow, this ends up working well.
On the driver side of things we are using AMD’s 12.101.2 press drivers for the 7790, and their Catalyst 13.2 beta 7 drivers for the rest of our AMD cards. For our NVIDIA cards we are using 314.21.
Unfortunately we only had a very short period of time to spend with this card due to AMD’s launch schedule conflicting with NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference this week. As a result while we’ve been able to put together our usual analysis and data collections, we’ve only been able to compare it to around half a dozen other cards – the relevant AMD and NVIDIA cards above and below the 7790, and for a historical perspective we’ve thrown in the Radeon HD 6870.
Similarly, because of a short period of time to write this article our performnace commentary will be lighter than usual, so our apologies on that. But the fact of the matter is that the 7790 results will speak for themselves as we’ll see in our charts. Against AMD’s lineup the 7790 is comfortably in between the 7770 and 7850, offering 130% of the former and 84% of the latter on average. While against NVIDIA’s lineup the 7790 is 11% faster than the GTX 650 Ti, beating the 650 Ti – sometimes by quite a bit – in everything but Battlefield 3. The question, as is often the case, is not performance but price.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: | Samsung 305T |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7850 AMD Radeon HD 7790 AMD Radeon HD 7770 AMD Radeon HD 6870 Sapphire HD 7790 Dual-X OC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 314.21 AMD 12.101.2 7790 Press Beta AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta 7 |
| OS: | Windows 8 Pro |
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Parhel - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
Well said, and thanks. I no longer visit Dailytech for the same reasons. I enjoy reading comments, since they can offer other perspectives from like-minded people, but unmoderated is worse than nothing at all. This used to be my favorite tech site, but the comments section here has slowly been pushing me to avoid it most of the time.medi01 - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
Suddenly Fermi is forgotten and it's only now that AMD will edge out nVidia on power efficiency.silverblue - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
The 7790 reminds me of the 4770. Sure, that was on a new process node, but it's a late addition to the line designed to take advantage of tweaks, process improvements, etc.There may be a lot of transistors in a GCN design but I couldn't help feel that there were power savings to be had. For this reason, I'd hope that their next flagship doesn't exceed the 7970GE's power draw whilst providing a decent performance boost.
Lucian2244 - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Good article, very detailed.I think NVidia is replying to this with the new 650 Ti Boost.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
1 GB VRAM is ridiculous, especially for a $150 product.ericore - Thursday, March 28, 2013 - link
For those who want the most power in the smallest package and power drain, look no further then the Radeon 7790. The only disappointment was the heat factor, but more or less the same performance as 7850 at half the power; that's great. Also, I don't mind that AMD went the 6 ghz vram route, because now there is even more reason to get 2 GB which is especially needed if you apply a dozens or hundreds of mods to your games. Also its the 128 bit interface that kept the power low, so despite everyone's cussing AMD made the right choices. I have a GTX 460 which easily uses at least 200 watts. This 7790 is almost twice as fast and uses 2.5 times less power. The pricing is acceptable, if you were to include 2GB by default, then why bother with the 7850; they still want ppl to buy that one.slickr - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 - link
Hey Anand, can you guys please do a video quality test? I mean I haven't seen any such test on any website for over 3 years. So please, can you do a video quality test in movies and games and please also use low quality video as well, not just top of the line 1080p type videos that would look amazing even on a GeForce 3.