Mar 5, 2011 18:31 GMT  ·  By
AMD Radeon HD 6870, one of the cheapest 6000-series AMD graphics cards available in retail
   AMD Radeon HD 6870, one of the cheapest 6000-series AMD graphics cards available in retail

Now that the rumors regarding Nvidia's GTX 550 Ti graphics card have been confirmed, everyone turned its attention towards AMD's camp, and recent online reports claim that the Sunnyvale-based company is preparing a Radeon HD 6790 GPU to counteract Nvidia's new mainstream solution.

The card would supposedly come after the GTX 550 Ti, but nothing is certain at this point as references to the HD 6790 have only popped up on a few German websites, including Heise.de and HardwareLuxx.

It goes without saying that the existence of the Radeon HD 6790 hasn't been confirmed by AMD or any of its hardware partners.

Right now, the cheapest 6000-series AMD card that can be purchased from retail is the HD 6850, which is now listed at $169.99, so users who want a more budget-friendly solution have to turn their attention towards the older 5000-series AMD GPUs or Nvidia's camp.

Although the pricing of the GTX 550 Ti hasn't been made public yet, the card should be placed right between the $145.99 GTX 460 768MB and the $119.99 GTS 450, if its performance is taken into consideration.

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is going to be made official by Nvidia on March 15 and the card is based on the GF116-400 core which packs 192 CUDA cores, 32 texturing units, 24 ROP units and a 192-bit wide memory bus.

The GPU clock is set at 900MHz while the 1GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 4,100MHz, providing 70% more bandwidth than the GTS 450, the graphics card it is meant to replace.

In addition, the GTX 550 Ti has a TDP of only 116W (10W more than the GTS 450), features two-way SLI support, two dual-link DVI-I ports and one mini HDMI port.

No details regarding the specifications of the Radeon HD 6790 have been released until now.