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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Sabresiberian - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
A roadmap is nothing but a projection of what is PLANNED for the future, not some kind of "promise" or "guarantee". Calling AMD people liars because the released product didn't match the projection is childish at best.And before you slap the "fanboy" label on me, I prefer Nvidia generally speaking (but I'm not going to cut off my proverbial nose to spite my face in order to be brand loyal; if AMD has the current best solution for my purposes, I'm going to buy AMD).
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 23, 2013 - link
128 bit bus is great, the HD5770 proved that.BWHAHAHHAAA
dishayu - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Good eye. But then they metion HD7790 as Pitcairn LE in that infographic. What they have launched as HD7790 now is Bonaire.ShieTar - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Maybe they surprised themselves by getting GDDR5 to run at 6GHz, and realized that they can stick with 128bit at that speed?Lonyo - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
They were going to use a cutdown Pitcairn, being 7870/7850 GPU, and cut down the GPU core to use excess cores that couldn't make the cut as 7870/7850s.They might have gone with 256-bit to simplify the product for AIB partners who could just re-use their HD7850 designs, rather than needing a new design for a smaller run product.
The 7790 now is a new GPU designed to be cheaper to produce (as it's smaller) than Pitcairn, and the fact the memory can run at 6GHz is probably due in part to the fact it's a new GPU rather than a cut down Pitcairn.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
I don't see a launch date in the whole article, it's NOT available. I guess that's another mystery freebie for AMD's products here.Didn't see port config either, so what cabling do we have to buy to run 3 monitors when Asus 650ti runs 4 out of the box, 3 with dvi and vga only ?
Not impressed with the huge AMD biased game line up either, so expect your mileage to be less than shown.
No overclock talk really either - so it must blow at that.
Other sites are reporting amd's beta driver, so maybe they won't even have a release driver for this card when they release it, as AMD is often known to do, for like a year sometimes or forever in terms of any sort of quality-LOL.
Civ5 has only 1 bench rez, it must have crashed in others.
Crossfire ? Article didn't say.
Multi-monitor - no talk of that anymore since nVidia SPANKS amd to death on that now.
Hopefully you've fooled the internet tards again, because amd is bankrupt, for good reason.
Spoelie - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Let's feed the troll.Did you even read the article?
-Launch date is mentioned on page 1, in one and a half week
-Ports are clearly visible and standard, 2 DVI + HDMI + DisplayPort
-Lineup is consistent with every other review on Anandtech.
-There's an entire page on the new PowerTune and how it impacts overclocking, single sample OC investigation is irrelevant and best left for a dedicated vendor comparison.
-... really?
Who's the real tard here?
Spunjji - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Oh for a down-vote button. We expect no less than mindless bollocks from Cerise, but failing to read the article entirely is a new low.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 23, 2013 - link
No, that's what you do all the time. But thanks for the compliment, since you know I always read the articles completely, yet you think I didn't this time, WRONG.I've made a lot of money this past short week without a lot of rest, so I'll give you and dipsy doodle a point on the svengali launch date the article writer for the first time EVER declares "solid" before it even occurs, og wait, he always does that when it's AMD, but if it's nVidia he says we'll have to wait and see as they are probably lying...
ROFL
Who cares, the card sucks, amd is dying, the drivers blow beta chunks, and amd is way late to the party.
ppeterka - Thursday, July 18, 2013 - link
Just a question: And how much will your favored brand of GPUs cost, if AMD really dies? 10 times? 100 times? An arm, a leg, and both kidneys? Grow up, and understand how an ecosystem works for us all.BTW. I don't have GPU preferences, just grab what gives bets bang for bucks. If it has EasternElbonianVideoPigs GPU on it - be it...