First AMD Radeon HD 6790 Pictures Leaked Thanks to Sapphire

Although there is still about a week left until April 5, when AMD plans to officially introduce the Radeon HD 6790, the first pictures of the graphics card have started to emerge thanks to some leaked high resolution photos of Sapphire's HD 6790.

Taking a look at Sapphire's creation it becomes apparent that the company has decided to reuse the same cooling solution as that used for some of its Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 models.

This uses two large diameter heatpipes to draw the heat away from the Barts LE GPU and intro an aluminum heatsink which is then cooled by a large diameter fan placed right in the middle of a black plastic shroud.

As a result, Sapphire's graphics card should offer better thermal and acoustic performances than AMD's reference design at the expense of higher case temperatures, as all the hot air expelled while in operation is thrown right back into the system's chassis.

No other details about the Sapphire Radeon HD 6790, apart from the pictures provided, are available at this time.

However, from what we know until know about AMD's upcoming video card, this is powered by the Barts LE core that packs 800 streaming processors, 40 texturing units, 32 ROP units as well as a 256-bit memory interface and 1GB of video frame buffer.

The operating frequencies of the card have been set at 840MHz for the GPU and 1050MHz (4200MHz effective) for the GDDR5 memory.

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 150W.

As stated earlier, the AMD Radeon HD 6790 is expected to launch on April 5 and rumors suggest that the card will be priced at $130, which makes it about $20 cheaper than the Nvidia GTX 550 Ti. (via ComputerBase)