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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ThomasS31 - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
I dont think this is the Sea Island generation yet...Ryan Smith - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
This is Sea Islands. Oland and Bonaire are both part of the Sea Island family.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
Bonaire sounds (like Bel Air) all stuffy and prim and proper - too bad amd fanboys aren't classy.At least it's not pitcairn, the in the pit card.
KnightRAF - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
Congratulations Cerise, between this article and the HTC One article you have succeeded in injecting so much pointless crap that it is no longer worth the effort to sift your crap out to read the actual comments on the article.extide - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
PLEASE!!! Add folding@home benchmarks to your tests, please please!!Thank You!
JarredWalton - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Might want to read a little better before posting:http://www.anandtech.com/show/6837/14
extide - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Sorry, doh, I feel dumb. I quickly scanned the compute page and didn't see it. Thank you VERY MUCH for including these!!MrSpadge - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
It's good to see clock & voltage states become more fine-grained and their choice smarter. Ultimately how I'd like a GPU to work: set targets and limits for power use, temperature and noise.. and then crank it up as far as it goes. Vary chips by different amounts of execution units, not frequencies.This includes simple user settings for lowering power consumption (call it the "green mode" of whatever), if people want to, which would automatically choose lower voltages to increase efficiency.
And of course something similar to nVidias frame rate target: if performance if fine now, save power. And save some thermal headroom in case it's needed soon. Make smart use of the power budget. It's nice to see AMD making some progress!
Termie - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Ryan, just FYI, you're using Catalyst 13.2 beta 7 with the other cards, not Catalyst 13.7 betas as indicated in the text on "The Test" page.Ryan Smith - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Whoops. Thanks.