Introduction

At the start of this year / end of last year we saw the release of the HD 7870 XT, a Tahiti LE based video card with PowerColor showing it off in the form of the HD 7870 Myst Edition and Sapphire showing it off in the form of the HD 7870 XT. Both were really great video cards and a good addition to a very strong line up from AMD as well.

The middle of last year also see the HD 7000 series grow with a new higher end version of the HD 7970 in the form of the GHz Edition model which helped AMD secure the top spot for single GPU performance. Of course we know recently that spot has been taken back by NVIDIA with the release of the GEFORCE TITAN, a model that we unfortunately haven't had the pleasure in testing, but hope that we will soon.

Today, though, we see the growth of the HD 7000 series even further, a series that we really thought would be coming to an end as it hits being over a year old now. AMD want to continue to push more and more life out of the series, though, and that comes today with the release of a new mid-range card. The HD 7790 that's been released today sits as you'd expect between the HD 7770 and HD 7850.

While we've got a couple on route, today we'll be looking at the first one which arrived, and that was a video card from Sapphire. The HD 7790 1GB Dual-X OC is not only the first HD 7790 we're looking at, but also the first card that's going to be tested in our latest benchmarking changes which we'll cover a little later on.

For now there's a few things we need to do and that starts off with us looking at the package of the model. Once we've done that we'll take the time to look at the card along with a closer look at the specifications which will cover the main changes against the HD 7770. Finally it's then onto the test system setup and straight into the performance side of things.

Package

The front of the box gives us the model. Some of the main highlights here include the fact the card is overclocked and carries with it the Dual-X fan. The back of the box gives us some AMD specific features like 28nm architecture, GDDR5, EyeFinity and CrossFireX support to name a few of the main ones.

Moving inside the box and looking at the bundle it's a very typical mid-range Sapphire bundle. We've got the standard line up of paperwork alongside a driver CD. You can also see the standard CrossFire bridge, DVI to VGA connector, Molex to 6-pin PCIe power connector and a HDMI cable to round everything off.