MSI Radeon HD 7790 1GB OC Overclocked Video Card Review

Introduction

The battle of the mid-range video card models from both NVIDIA and AMD has been a strong one. They've both come in at a similar price point; saying that, though, we know that the NVIDIA GTX 650 Ti Boost comes in slightly higher, but at the same time offers double the amount of memory with 2GB, and slightly more performance.

The AMD Radeon HD 7790 comes in at around $20 less, is a little bit slower and also comes with only half the memory. Testing of the Sapphire HD 7790 2GB OC the other day also showed us that doubling the memory really did nothing for overall performance (literally), especially when talking about a real-world playable difference.

The problem is that between the two video cards we have quite a major difference that separates them and for us it's probably what makes the decision to choose one model over the other. AMD have become very aggressive with game bundling over the last six months, and that hasn't just stopped with the high-end models, it's also carried down to the lower-end ones as well.

We'll talk about that all more a little bit later, though. For now we've got to take a closer look at the package of the MSI Radeon HD 7790 1GB OC which we're looking at today, before moving onto the card itself. Due to the fact that we've already looked at a couple of HD 7790's already, we'll today be firing up MSI Afterburner and checking out the overclocking on this particular model.

Once we've covered both the out of the box specifications and what we did on the overclocking side of things, we'll look at our testbed, cover the cards that you'll see in our graphs here today, and get stuck into the performance. As we mentioned, though, the first thing we need to do is see what's going on with the bundle.

Package

Checking out the box you can see that the design isn't anything too fancy. Unlike the recent MSI GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB we looked at, this card doesn't fall under the new gaming series that MSI recently created. Overall it's a fairly standard layout, though, with the main information on the front and the back of the box giving us a bit more detail.

Moving inside the package you can see there's not a whole with just a Quick User Guide, driver CD and a DVI to VGA connector to round off the bundle.