AMD HD6790 Review

Conclusion

We’ve always been a big fan of the lesser cards here at OC3D. They are cheap to buy and usually can be overclocked to give performance that you’d expect from a much more expensive card.The HD6870 in particular is one we love as it’s great in a single-card form but runs with the best when in Crossfire.

So we had reasonably high hopes that the HD6790 would be right at the perfect place for a good value card that would overclock well and give lovely performance for those of us on a tight budget.

As it is the HD6790 is quite the opposite. Although in one or two tests it gives us fairly reasonable results, the reality is that it’s just been trimmed and tweaked too much on the architectural side to allow some overclocking to bring it up to speed.

In fact the performance is such that it’s really only a worthy purchase if you don’t plan on doing much at all with it and only want something that is capable of giving you a desktop and playing the odd video. There however it comes undone again because there are a wealth of cards that are perfectly adequate for those tasks.

We’re pretty sure you’d want to do some gaming on your latest purchase, and if you are on a budget you also want it to last a fair while as there will be a natural gap between upgrades. We can see absolutely no reason why you’d not save the extra 20-odd quid for a HD6850 which is a much higher performing card in a wealth of scenarios, and yet still wont break the bank.

All in all the HD6790 is a drop too far. It’s not good enough or cheap enough to take sales away from any of the cards already stuffed into this sector of the market, not least AMDs own HD6850. With a price around £80 it would be a worthy investment, but as it stands it’s a bit too pricey and a bit too slow.

Thanks to AMD for supplying the HD6790 for review. Discuss in our forums.