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Overview of the Sapphire HD7790
The packaging for teh HD7790 is what I have come to expect after many Sapphire cards. They all carry a soldier of sorts in various battel ready garb, which is actually quite tastefully done as it catches the eye and looks well rendered. If I saw it on the shelf taht alone as a consumer loans soem confidence of the type of graphics the card is capable of, I knwo that probably sounds odd but lets just go with it.
Here is a list of all items included in the accessory pack:
-
Installation Disc
- Quick Start Guide/Manual
- DVI to VGA Adapter
- Crossfire Bridge
- PATA 4 Pin connector to PCIe 6 pin adapter
- HDMI Cable
The accessory package is nice and it is really cool to see a HDMI cable bundled in even with the lower cost cards as that tells me Sapphire cares about you having everything you need to have this card up and running right out of the box. Also speaking of the box it was nice to see primarily recycled materials used for packaging as that get a environmentally concious point from me.
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Here you can see the card in full dress. The cooler is very large especially when you lok at the card flipped over and see that the rear shows a large chunk of PCB is blank and from what I can tell is tyhere just to support the larger cooler size. This tells me taht sapphire really means business on keeping this card super cool, especially consider the low TDP nature of the GPU.
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The rear IO supports multiple connectivity options including:
- DVI (x2)
- HDMI
- DisplayPort
This is connector array allows for the FleX functionality which allows for Dual DVI and HDMI displays in a 3 display array, this is nice and convenient as many displays simply do not have displayport.
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The card was simply begging to be stripped down and upon doing so you can see that being a mainstream model it really is quite simple. The small VRM cooler covers the relatively lightweight VRM which is more than adequate for powering this card. The cooler itself is simply beefy and looks as though it was built to handle much more heat than this card could ever dish out which means overclcoking shoudl be very good.
It is worth nothing that the card utilizes a suingle 6 pin PCIe connector for supplementyal power which means the total board power would peak at about 150W (75W 6 pin & 75W PCIe Slot) although I can bet this card never comes close to tapping that limit.
A closer Look at the HD7790
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The Hynix IC’s used here are rated for up to 6GHz which I have seen before and usually they have huge headroom above that. For example this card is set at 6400MHz right out of the box.
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Here we see some of the power control circuitry built onto the card which will ensure solid and reliable operation. This may seem small when you compare to other cards i have looked at but remember this mainstream GPU does not pull huge loads of power which means you dont need a huge VRM setup to run or even overclock the card.
