Sapphire was the first to get us a 7790 to check out and again the first with the 2GB variation of the card. Some neat little features make this card a nice standout from the crowd, so let’s see what the card has to offer .

Introduction – Sapphire HD 7790 2GB

Sapphire is the premier partner for AMD and so to get things from this first is growing less and less surprising. With the recent launch of the 7790 cards, the 1GB model left some users wondering why there was not a 2GB model offered to serve those looking to expand to multi display or even CrossFire setups. Sapphire was not too far behind with the answer we have today which is a 2GB variant of the popular HD7790 model card.

 

  

The HD 7790 2GB edition comes to market at a price of $169.99 directly from Newegg at the time of writing. This places it right in the fold for some stiff competition so lets see what the card has to offer for the budget conscious gamer.

 

 

Here you can see that the new Bonaire GPU offers some serious muscle from the over 2 billion transistors and much higher texture units available. The much higher speed 6Gbps memory data rate definitely will help blast data along as well which all adds up to a very strong card for those gamers on a budget.

It is worth nothing that the HD7790 does fall into the AMD Newer Settle Campaign which means buyers are eligible to be bundled with a copy of Bioshock Infinite from participating retailers, so that could be a pretty nice added bonus for anyone looking at picking up the newest Bioshock offering.

 

Key Features

New “Bonaire” GPU

The new HD 7790 is powered by a 28nm GCN architecture GPU similar to all of the other 7000 series GPUs. Unlike other 7700 series card which were Cape Verde models. This once again is very similar to the recent 7870 models which did not use Pitcairn GPU like other 7800’s and opted for a Tahiti LE model.

 

As you can see the Bonaire GPU die is a new design in between 7700 and 7800 series which is larger and as we have already seen carries some definite capabilities for a gaming system.

 

 

 

Sapphire FleX Technology

TheHD7790 Supports Sapphire FleX technology which allows triple display connectivity without the need for displayport, and a 4th using the DisplayPort. This allows for excellent compatibility with triple display Eyefinity setups across the wides range of available displays.

 

AMD PowerTune with Boost

The HD7790 supports full dynamic clocking of the GPU speed according to limits of thermal and power envelopes depending on the loading of the card. This could allow for a much higher clock for even better gaming performance .

 

Rear Backplate memory cooling

Sapphire Equipped the 2GB model with a custom backplate which has a special pass through on the PCB and a passive cooling array made to use the exhausted cooling airflow from the GPU cooler to assist with cooling the memory chips on the rear of the card.

 

PCI Express Gen 3 Capable

Like all 7 series AMD GPU’s the HD7790  fully supports PCIe 3.0 for higher speed throughput and better overall bandwidth.