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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vailr - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Didn't AMD originally supply an info-graphic (about a year ago, just prior to the release of their 7000 series cards) that the 7790 card was to have been their lowest-priced 7000 series card that still provided a 256-bit memory interface? Any explanation for the downgrade now, to a 128-bit interface?campcreekdude - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
I thought the 7890 is supposed to be 256-bit.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
The big problem is that it doesn't have enough VRAM. 1 GB is too little for 2013 cards. Pretty ridiculous for one priced at $150.vailr - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Info-graphic from a year ago that shows the 7790 with a 256-bit memory bus:http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-hd7000-28nm-souther...
zshift - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Nice catch!CeriseCogburn - Saturday, March 23, 2013 - link
Amd lies all the time then fails to deliver, so the fanboys give them a thousand breaks, another chance, some more time - " in the future what AMD I bought today will be great, it's "futureproof" " (even though it doesn't work correctly right now)...LOL - goodbye amd
So the beta driver, uhh perma beta driver must have crashed out in civ5 a lot.
eric.zaba@gmail.com - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
im sorry but if you must insist on invalid staments you shouldnt be on this website because smarter people will correct you on YOUR fanboyness. First of all amd beats nvidia at every price point(check linus tech tips on his youtube video card chanell) and they have perfect drivers. working for 6 months on the same amd driver and no crashes. infact i tried a new crysis 3 driver and it didnt crash then either and that was a beta driver. and my radeon 7770 destroyed the nvidia gtx 650, which is at the same price point.medi01 - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
I hope you work for nVidia.Because writing such crap for free is hard to imagine.
Gigaplex - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
How do you keep a straight face when accusing others of being fanboys? You're the biggest fanboy I've ever seen.Deo Domuique - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
AMD Peasants, that's what we are... First time in my over 15-years "career" on PC gaming I went with AMD and a 7950, and you can't even imagine how much I regret it.