PowerColor HD 6790 Review

RHKCommander959 - April 4, 2011
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Testing:

The testing consists of running Aliens vs. Predator, Metro 2033, Crysis Warhead, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Just Cause 2, Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.1, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, 3DMark 11 Professional, 3DMark Vantage, and temperature/power consumption testing. Three common resolutions are used for all the tests with 4AA and 16AF settings, but the 3DMark tests have four resolutions/runs. After a run through all the tests, the card is overclocked to roughly its maximum stable capabilities and then tested again. Settings stay the same for each card tested so the results can be compared. All testing is done on similar hardware running 64-bit Windows 7. The charts are all organized in terms of best to worst performance.

Processor: Intel i7 920 @ 3.60GHz
Motherboard: ASUS P6X58D-E
Memory: Mushkin Redline DDR3 1600MHz 6-8-6-24
Video Card: ASUS GTX550 Ti DirectCU TOP
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 7200.12 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Case: Hiper Osiris

Comparison Video Cards:

Sapphire HD 6990
AMD HD 6970 CrossfireX
HD 6970 & HD 6950
Sapphire HD 5970 2GB
Sapphire HD 5870
Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic 2GB
XFX HD 6870
XFX HD 6850
ASUS GTX 580 SLI
ASUS GTX 570 SLI
NVIDIA GTX 580
NVIDIA GTX 570
NVIDIA GTX 480
Galaxy GTX 470 GC
EVGA GTX 460 FTW
ASUS ENGTX465

Overclocking:

PowerColor HD 6790 1000/1235

Overclocking the PowerColor 6790 was simple using either AMD Graphics Overdrive with maximum speeds of 950MHz core and 1250MHz memory or MSI Afterburner v2.1 with the clock limit unlocked in the MSI Afterburner.cfg file for higher capabilities. Software voltage modification isn't supported yet. Even so, I managed to game for a while at 1010MHz core and 1260MHz memory although the system would freeze randomly. Turning the settings down, I didn't achieve reliable stability until 1000MHz core and 1235MHz memory. The card may be able to operate stable over 1GHz but was bumped down to make sure it could pass through all of the testing. It was likely the memory which was the culprit but it still managed to overclock 185MHz over stock. Replacing the stock thermal paste netted a decrease of a few degrees, temperatures were never a problem though. GPU-Z doesn't yet detect the card properly, it only gets a few things right including the clock speeds, card name and drivers.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

Testing for the maximum clock speed consists of looping Crysis Warhead and Unigine 2.5 for 30 minute each to see where the clock speeds will fail when pushed. If the clock speed adjustment fails, then the clock speeds and tests are rerun until they pass the full one hour of testing.