14 DAY TRIAL // Supposed to be launched on March 31, AMD has decided to push back the release date of the Radeon HD 6790 by a couple of days to April 5, as the company wants to give its boards partners some more time to prepare their graphics cards based on the Barts LE core.
The Radeon HD 6790 was designed as a mainstream solution, that would stand between the HD 5770 and the HD 6850 and would counter Nvidia's GTX 550 Ti and the soon to be phased out GTX 460 768MB.
In order to achieve this, AMD went with a cut-down version of the Barts GPU, the same core used for the HD 6850 and HD 6870, that had two of the SM units of the HD 6850 disabled, meaning that the card will pack “only” 800 stream processors.
The number of texturing units has also been lowered, from 48 in the HD 6850 to 40 in the HD 6790, but the graphics card still features 32 ROP units as well as a 256-bit memory interface and 1GB of video frame buffer.
Furthermore, the operating frequencies of AMD's new creation are higher than those of the HD 6850 as the GPU is run at 840MHz while the memory is clocked at 1050MHz (4200MHz effective).
While the new clocks will most certainly improve the performances of the card, it has also pushed its power consumption over that of its older brother as the TDP is now rated at a whopping 150W.
This is almost as high as that of the HD 6870 (151W), so AMD was forced to use two PCI Express 6-pin power connectors for the HD 6790.
No details regarding pricing were made official by AMD, but from what we have learned by now, the Radeon HD 6970 should be available for around $130, which makes it about $20 cheaper than the Nvidia GTX 550 Ti. (via NordicHardware)