14 DAY TRIAL // With just a few more days to go until AMD makes official the Radeon HD 6790, the first details about the card's overclocking potential have hit the Web and everything seems to suggest that AMD's latest solution is a great overclocker and that it could even feature an unlockable GPU.
The Radeon HD 6790 is destined to fill the performance gap that exists right now between the HD 5770 and the HD 6850 and is based on a cut down version of the Barts core.
This means that AMD has disabled some of the hardware resources available in the Radeon HD 6850 core so that its new graphics card now features 800 stream processors, 40 texturing units, 32 ROP units and a 256-bit memory bus.
To put things in perspective, the Barts Pro GPU that is used inside the HD 6850 packs no less than 960 stream processors and 48 texturing units, while the rest of the core specifications are identical.
However, early rumors suggest that these units can be actually enabled to turn the HD 6790 into an Radeon HD 6850, via a simple BIOS hack.
Nothing is certain at this point as the news hasn't been confirmed by any official source, but if this turns out to be true it could turn the Radeon HD 6790 into a very attractive solution, especially if we consider that Fudzilla claims that the reference card can easily go past the 1GHz mark.
The stock operating frequencies of the HD 6790 are set at 840MHz for the core while the 1GB of GDDR5 memory is run at 1050MHz (4200MHz effective).
The AMD Radeon HD 6790 is expected to become official on April 5, and it has been suggested that its price will be set at $130, which makes it about $20 cheaper than the Nvidia GTX 550 Ti.