Saturday, March 16th 2013
Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 Dual-X Pictured, Tested
Here are the first pictures of Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 Dual-X, the company's premium offering based on AMD's new GPU. The card features Sapphire's in-house PCB and cooler designs, including an aluminium fin-stack heatsink ventilated by a pair of 80 mm fans, and a 21.5 cm long PCB. The card draws power from a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, its display outputs are similar to the HD 7850, with a pair of DVI connectors, HDMI, and DisplayPort. It can pair with another of its kind, only.SweClockers, who have one of these, wasted no time in putting it through 3DMark Fire Strike and 3DMark 11. In Fire Strike, the card scored 4026 points (graphics) compared to the 4395 points of Radeon HD 7850, which is just 8.3 percent slower. It's a similar story with 3DMark 11, where the HD 7790 scored 1583 points (graphics) compared to the 1734 points of HD 7850, just 8.7 percent slower. The reviewer is using a beta Catalyst driver bearing version number 12.101.2.0.A GPU-Z screenshot taken for the card reveals clock speeds of 1075 MHz core, and 1600 MHz memory, which results in a memory bandwidth of 102.4 GB/s. A point to note here is GPU-Z 0.6.8 doesn't officially support HD 7790 "Bonaire," and so some of the values which are not reported by the driver, such as stream processor count, TMU/ROP counts, and even memory bus width could be unreliably reported. Values such as clock speeds and memory size are driver-reported, and could be accurate.
Source:
SweClockers
31 Comments on Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 Dual-X Pictured, Tested
A little bird from the folks at MSI whispered to me they also got a similar version :), Advanced cooled and *military* styled.
*970 was dual-GPU high-end one generation and single-GPU high-end the next. The 5970 was actually faster than the 6970.
The real point I'm trying to make is that I feel that AMD looked at it and thought to themselves that the 5800-series alone isn't enough to encompass top of their GPU lineup and there were too many gaps. It's all about hitting as many price points in the market so no matter what your need is, they will have something to fit your budget.
I agree that it is confusing but I completely understand why AMD did it.