14 DAY TRIAL // After weeks of predictions and reports about it, the latest graphics card from Advanced Micro Devices is finally ready to land in people's computers, or to be used in totally new systems as the situation demands.
As we said yesterday, the new adapter, called Radeon HD 7790, will be positioned between the HD 7770 (powered by Cape Verde GPU) and the HD 7800 series (based on Pitcairn).
That goes both in terms of performance and as far as pricing is concerned, though the latter bit of info was not out before today.
Fortunately, AMD has made the official introduction and included the tag: $149.99, or 116-149.99 Euro.
Spec-wise, the Radeon HD 7790 is powered by the Bonaire GPU, which is designed on the same 28nm manufacturing process as its aforementioned peers.
It runs at 1 GHz, though there is an updated dynamic clock adjustment technology as well, which supposedly checks game requirements and manages speed in order to optimize power consumption.
The GPU has 896 stream processors, 56 TMUs, 16 ROPs and a memory interface of 128 bits. It won't lead to the greatest bandwidth in the world, but with the 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM backing the graphics processor, and the 6 GHz frequency, it still reaches 96 GB/s.
Dual-independent tessellation units are part of the GPU as well, as demanded by the Graphics CoreNext architecture.
Furthermore, AMD included a pair of DVI connectors, an HDMI output, and a DisplayPort video link. The TDP (thermal design power) is rated at 85W.
Thus, the energy provided by the PCI Express slot only needs a 6-pin PCI Express power connector to complement it. There is no need for large 8-pin or more than one power plug here.
Stay tuned as we comb through all the rebranded Radeon HD 7790 adapters from AMD's various partners.