14 DAY TRIAL // With just a day to go until the Radeon HD 6790 becomes official, the very first graphics cards based on the Barts LE core are already up for grabs from various online stores, as the PowerColor Radeon HD 6790 has been listed on popular retailer Newegg.com for $149.99 US.
Compared to most of the company's Radeon HD 6800 series graphics cards, its most recent creation uses a more cost-effective cooling solution that expels a part of the heat generated by the card back in the desktop case.
This is also accompanied by a reduced number of display outputs as the card packs only one DVI port, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort connector.
Otherwise, the PowerColor Radeon HD 6790 doesn't seem to differ too much from its competitors as it comes clocked at AMD's stock frequencies of 840MHz core and 1050MHz memory (4200MHz effective), and features 1 GB of GDDR5 memory connected to the GPU over a 256-bit wide memory interface.
The rest of the card's specs are not listed on its Newegg page, but from what we do know from previous leaks, the HD 6790 is based on the Barts LE core and packs 800 stream processors, 40 texturing units and 32 ROP units.
In terms of performance, the card is expected to sit somewhere between the HD 5770 and the HD 6850 and, and some early benchmarks have shown that, in Crysis, its performance closely resembles that of the Nvidia GTX 560 1GB.
The load power consumption of the two rival cards is also similar, although Nvidia's solution is a bit more energy efficient when sitting at the Windows desktop in idle mode.
The Radeon HD 6790 will be officially launched by AMD on April 5, and it was designed so that it would compete with the Nvidia GTX 550 Ti, which has a similar MSRP. (via TechPowerUp)