Sapphire HD7790 OC Review

As we mentioned at the very start of this review, the AMD HD7790 is being released today to target the sector between HD7770 and HD7850 solutions. The success or failure of this graphics card is based strictly on price. The punters looking for a gaming card in the £100-£150 sector base their decision simply on the greatest bang for buck.

Just before publication we were instructed that the AMD HD7790 would be priced around the £125-£130 mark. If we look at some deals today, we have an Asus HD7770 Top 1GB priced at £99.98 inc vat. There is absolutely no doubt that the HD7790 is significantly faster than the HD7770, especially with the latest Direct X 11 games.

The biggest problem for the HD7790 are the continually dropping prices of the HD7850. We have found a handful of HD7850 solutions available online for less than £140, such as this one from HIS. Sapphire also have an HD7850 available for £137.99, with Tomb Raider and BioShock Infinite as part of the deal. We can't see a better buy under £150 right now.

If partners release the HD7790 at £130, and the HD7850 prices continue to hold at £137.99 then AMD really are on the road to nowhere. Make no mistake, the HD7850 is much quicker than the HD7790. We tested Sapphire's overclocked HD7790 today and it was still clearly outperformed by a basic, reference clocked HD7850 solution. Even when we cranked the HD7790 core to 1,260mhz the 860mhz HD7850 was ahead.

If AMD manage to drop the price of the reference HD7790 to £109.99 inc vat then it makes more sense, as they can phase out the HD7770 and offer the HD7850 at around £135.

As it stands right now, I really see no reason to save the £10 and opt for the HD7790. The HD7850 has greater shader power and the 256 bit memory interface helps improve bandwidth at higher resolutions.

That said, the Sapphire HD7790 is an excellent graphics card. It is very quiet when gaming, and runs cool under load thanks to the excellent two fan cooling system the company have incorporated. There is a lot of headroom on the core as well, we managed to push the core clock speed from 1,075mhz to 1,260mhz without any problem.

We would imagine there will be a premium to pay for this overclocked version of the HD7790, which is concerning, as it may end up going head to head on price against their own HD7850.

As it stands, we can certainly recommend the Sapphire HD7790 OC,  it is a cool running, quiet card which can handle many of the latest Direct X 11 games, even at 1080p resolution with Anti Aliasing enabled.

Pros:

• Quiet.
• Runs cool.
• looks good.

Cons:

• Reference HD7790 price point needs to be around the £110 inc vat point.
• HD7850 is faster with only a small premium.

Kitguru says: Another messy AMD launch, prices of the HD7790 need to drop to £110 before the reference card is a good buy. The biggest problem is AMD's own HD7850 available at bargain basement prices. Déjà Vu?

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