AMD has decided to postpone the launch of the new mid-range card Radeon HD 6790. Exactly why the launch has been moved up to April 5th is uncertain, but most likely AMD wanted to give partners time to finalize their own cards. At the same time we hear good news about the power consumption and the first pictures.
AMD Radeon HD 6790 builds on the new Barts LE GPU sporting 800 stream processors and is directly related to the cousins in the Radeon HD 6800 series. Besides less stream processors and texture units Radeon HD 6790 comes with relatively high frequencies and the first specifications from AMD spoke of a relatively high power consumption, namely 150 watt.
We questioned these numbers, that directly came from the company, and additional digging have confirmed our suspicions. Whether it was a spelling error or a simple mistake we don’t know, but according to the first tests Radeon HD 6790 will consume less power than Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850.
Our source did not want to mention any exact number, but the card will lay 15-20 watt lower than Radeon HD 6850 at regular gaming, which would put the card in the 110-115 watt envelope. This matches other specifications much better.
| HD 6790 | HD 6850 | HD 6870 | |
| GPU | Barts LE | Barts Pro | Barts XT |
| Technology | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm |
| Die size |
255 mm2 | 255 mm2 | 255 mm2 |
| Transistors | 1.7 billion | 1.7 billion | 1.7 billion |
| SM units |
10 |
12 | 14 |
| Stream processors | 800 |
960 | 1120 |
| GPU freq. |
840 MHz | 775 MHz | 900 MHz |
| Performance | 1.34 TFLOPs | 1.5 TFLOPs | 2.0 TFLOPs |
| Texture units |
40 |
48 | 56 |
| Texture fillrate | 33.6 Gtexel/s | 37.2 Gtexel/s | 50.4 Gtexel/s |
| ROP units |
32 |
32 | 32 |
| Memory type |
GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 |
| Memory buffer |
1GB | 1GB | 1GB |
| Memory frequency |
1 050 MHz (4 200MHz) |
1 000 MHz (4 000MHz) |
1 050 MHz (4 200MHz) |
| Bus width |
256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Bandwidth | 134,4 GB/s | 128 GB/s | 134,4 GB/s |
| Power connectors |
2 x 6-pin | 1 x 6-pin | 2 x 6-pin |
| Effetförbrukning | 19/110-115W (estimated) | 19/129W | 19/151W |
Sapphire is one of the partners that has been given some extra time to set the retail suit for Radeon HD 6790 and we have managed to acquire several high resolution pictures of the card, with its custom cooler and dual DVI, one DisplayPort and one HDMI outputs. We can most likely count on several unique solutions from AMD partners at the launch of Radeon HD 6790, next week.
When Radeon HD 6790 launches the prices are expected to lie around $110-130 and become a direct reply to NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 550 Ti. How the two match in performance remains to be seen.
