XFX HD6950 DD, HD6870 DD and HD6790 DD Review

The XFX HD6790 DD arrives in an eye catching box with the ‘DD' lettering the primary focus of the design.

The bundle contains literature on the XFX range, including their power supplies which we have reviewed before on Kitguru. They also supply access to their indepth support system, ensuring customers have live support if problems occur. Finally there is a sign for a door, to ensure you aren't interrupted when you are viewing por…. I mean playing games.

The card is constructed around an attractive black PCB which features anti tamper stickers over the locking screws at the rear. No applying your own paste without invalidating your warranty it seems. We will take the card apart shortly however as we don't care about warranty.

The front of the card is cooled by a large, dual fan system, in matching black. There is a hefty copper heatpipe configuration at the top of the card with the a ‘Double Dissipation' sticker above them.

The HD6790 is Crossfire capable, in a two way configuration and it requires two 6 pin power connectors to operate correctly.

The HD 6790 DD has two DVI ports on the I/O plate, with a full size HDMI connector and two mini displayport connectors. There is full support for AMD Eyefinity, although to power games across multiple monitors you will probably need to invest in two of them. We like how XFX cut their logo into the backplate.

Getting access to the board requires mounting screws, backplate screws and PCB screws to be removed. The cooler looks great, with three thick direct contact copper heatpipes leading into two separate racks of aluminum fins on either side of the core.

XFX are using 1GB of high quality GDDR5 Elpida memory on the custom PCB.

Above, a GPUz screenshot of the XFX HD6790 DD. It runs at 840mhz core and 1050mhz via the 1GB of GDDR5 memory (4200mhz effective) which is connected via a 256 bit interface. The card is based on the 40nm AMD Barts core and has 800 unified shaders and 16 ROPS.

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