XFX HD Radeon 6790 Review

RHKCommander959 - May 5, 2011
» Discuss this article (6)

Lowest Prices

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
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366
Motherboard: ASUS P6X58D-E
Memory: Mushkin Redline DDR3 1600MHz 6-8-6-24
Memory: Mushkin 996805 Redline PC312800 6-8-6-24 1600MHz
Video Card: XFX HD 6790
Power Supply: Mushkin 1000 watt Joule Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Case: Cooler Master HAF 932

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:

XFX HD 6790 980/1250

Overclocking the XFX HD Radeon 6790 was simple enough. I ran into an odd glitch where the card kept trying to run at 775 MHz (the stock clock rate of the 6850 - its bigger brother). With MSI Afterburner 2.2.0b2 and unofficial overclocking enabled, I was able to correct the clock speed and also overclock it. Overdrive failed to overclock it, pretty common for beta drivers and AMD is supposed to have a release coming soon. The card would run stable in most of the testing up to 995 MHz core although it would crash in a few of the benchmarks until I went down to 980 MHz. If voltage control is unlocked in the future, the card would very easily pass 1 GHz. I pushed the memory up to 1250 MHz stable and left it there with more headroom available. Temperatures ranged from the low 30°C's up to mid-60°C's and AMD PowerPlay was unable to work fully in overclocked idle operation from my observations.

Maximum Clock Speeds:

Testing for the maximum clock speed consists of looping Crysis Warhead and Unigine 2.5 for 30 minutes 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.