As sure as snow in winter or sun in summer, AMD has one more refresh to its graphics card portfolio this spring. The Radeon HD 6790 is purely a few misplaced digits far from the much more illustrious HD 6970 , but you have to be ready to tell both apart by another, altogether more significant spec: the recent mid-tier card retails at $149. Predictably, its performance offers no threat to AMD’s single-GPU flagship, however the 6790′s 840MHz graphics and shader clock speeds plus 1GB of GDDR5 running at a pretty good 4.2GHz data rate don’t appear to be anything to smell at either. Reviewers agreed that it’s AMD’s slightly delayed answer to NVIDIA’s GTX 460 , and with the latter card exiting retail availability to make room for the (oddly enough) less powerful GTX 550 Ti , AMD’s new solution looks set to be the simpler choice on the shared $149 price point. Alas, being limited to 800 Stream processors and 16 ROPs does expose the HD 6790 to being cannibalized by AMD’s own Radeon HD 6850 (which are had for sub-$150 in case you’re tolerant of rebates) and that seems to be exactly what happens. a great card, then, but one who will require a fair discount dip to make economic sense. Benchmarks await below.
Read – Tech Report
Read – AnandTech
Read – Tom’s Hardware
Read – PC Perspective
The Engadget Interview: BlackBerry PlayBook product manager Michael Clewley
Mozilla rumored to debut LG-made Boot to Gecko device at MWC
