XFX HD 6790 Review (dual fan)

1. Introduction2. The XFX HD67903. Testing Methodology4. Synthetic: Ungine Heaven Benchmark5. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage6. Synthetic: 3DMark 117. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark V2.08. Gaming: Resident Evil 59. Gaming: Alien V Predator10. Gaming: Mafia 211. Gaming: Lost Planet 212. Gaming: Total War: Shogun 213. Gaming: Far Cry 214. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 215. Gaming: Home Front16. Technical: Acoustics Performance17. Technical: Thermal Dynamics18. Technical: Power Consumption19. Technical: Overclocking20. Closing Thoughts21. View All Pages

AMD's new HD6790 has already proven to be a great performer for the gaming masses, delivering HD gaming capabilities without breaking the bank. Today we are looking at the new XFX HD6790 Edition which features a lovely, custom made dual fan cooler.

As we have said before, AMD are marketing the HD6790 at the 1080p gaming masses, with ‘balanced performance and price' being the main focal point. They used a similar strategy with the last gen HD5770 and it was a big seller for AMD partners. If you are building a new media center to pair up with a large High Definition television and don't want to make too many compromises, is this the ideal purchase?

	AMD HD6790
Compute Power	1.34 TFLOPs
Core Clock Speed	840mhz
Shader Architecture	VLIW5
Stream Processors	800 ALU
Texture Units	40
ROPs/Z-Stencil	16/64
Frame Buffer	1GB GDDR5
Memory Width/Speed	256 bit, 4.2 Gbps

XFX box artwork is always brilliant, and this one is a subtle, and slightly futuristic play on the dual fan configuration of the card.

Inside, the bundle is spartan, with no power or video converters. There is plenty of literature on XFX products including their power supply range. There is also a ‘Do Not Disturb' sign for a door handle.

The XFX HD6790 is built around a custom, black PCB design, with a modified heatpipe cooler incorporated. We have used similar dual fan heatpipe coolers from XFX before, and they are exceptionally good. We have high hopes this particular model will be just as impressive.

The HD6790 is CrossfireX capable, only in dual configurations. You need to aim into a higher range if you want 3, or even 4 way CrossfireX.

The HD6790 requires two 6 pin PCI E power connectors to operate. The last generation HD5770 only needed one.

The XFX HD6790 board follows the AMD reference design, with two mini DisplayPort connectors, HDMI and dual DVI output configuration. The Sapphire card we looked at recently opted for full sized connectors.

This particular board uses a tri-heat pipe, direct contact cooling method. The heatpipes are very nicely engineered and they split the heat transfer up into two rows of aluminum fins.

The card uses quality Hynix H5GQ1H24afr memory.

An overview of the hardware in GPUz. This is a reference clocked card operating at 840mhz core, and 1050mhz (4200mhz effective) from the 1GB of GDDR5 memory. This is connected via a 256 bit memory interface.

We would normally test these cards in a lower specified system, but today we wanted to see how the HD6790 will fit into the wider scheme of the market, so we are calling upon our Core i7 970 test bed which is overclocked to 4.33ghz. We have used this system to test many of our samples in recent months so it means with the synthetic benchmark testing we can get a better overview of overall market performance levels.

Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.33ghz
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65 (MS-7522)
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10
Power Supply: OCZ ZX 1250W
Memory: 6GB GSkill Performance Gaming ram @ 902.9 MHz (2:10) @ 7-8-7-24
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)
Monitors: Dell 3011, Dell U2410 UltraSharp, Sanyo 50 inch LCD Television.

Other graphics cards:
Nvidia GTX590
Nvidia GTX580
Nvidia GTX570
XFX HD5970 Black Edition 4GB (QuadFireX)
AMD HD6990
AMD HD6970
AMD HD6950
AMD HD6870
AMD HD6850
AMD HD5870
AMD HD5850
Sapphire HD5770 Vapor X Edition (860mhz core)
MSI N560GTX Ti Twin Frozr II
nVidia GTX570
nVidia GTX 550 ti (900/1026)
nVidia GTX460 OC (715/900)

Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Catalyst 11.4
Forceware 266.58 WHQL
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark
HQV 2.0 Software

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter

Games:
Mafia 2
Resident Evil 5
Far Cry 2
Alien V Predator
Lost Planet 2
Tom Clancy HAWX 2
Home Front
Total War: Shogun 2

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

The XFX HD6790 manages to outperform the GTX550 ti by a single frame per second. CrossfireX scaling is strong, averaging over 50 fps, which outclasses the high end HD6950 solution.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

A score of just under 12,000 points places the HD6790 behind the HD6850 (12,803) and yet again, ahead of the GTX 550ti with which scores 9,924 points.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

The new 6 series hardware is very capable in Direct X, managing to outperform the HD570 in CrossfireX, and falling just behind the GTX580 ! When you factor in that two of these cards cost £230 inc vat and a GTX580 is still around £400, it seems like a pretty good deal.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here

	XFX HD6790
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	196

A fantastic set of results for the budget AMD card, scoring 196 points out of 210. The hardware is delivering comparable image quality to the high end boards.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

The single HD6790 outperforms the GTX550 Ti again. CrossfireX scaling is very strong, with two cards able to outperform a single GTX580 by quite a margin.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparible throughout reviews.

The single card struggles to maintain high frame rates with this demanding Direct X 11 title. Adding a second card transforms the experience, outperforming a single GTX580 yet again.

Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta, the son of Sicilian immigrants. As the game progresses, Vito will join the Falcone Crime Family and become a made man. There are 15 chapters in the game, connected into one storyline.

We tested at 2560×1600 with fullscreen: on, antialiasing:off , Anisotrophic filtering: off, Shadow Quality: High, Ambient Occlusion: on, Geometry Detail: High and APEX PhysX: medium.

With PhsyX enabled the XFX card struggles to keep up with the nvidia counterparts. Disabling PhysX improves the experience.

Lost Planet 2 is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition which is also made by Capcom, taking place ten years after the events of the first game, on the same fictional planet. The story takes place back on E.D.N. III 10 years after the events of the first game. The snow has melted to reveal jungles and more tropical areas that have taken the place of more frozen regions. The plot begins with Mercenaries fighting against Jungle Pirates.

After destroying a mine, the Mercenaries continue on to evacuate the area, in which a Category-G Akrid appears and attacks them. After being rescued, they find out their evacuation point (Where the Category-G appeared) was a set-up and no pick up team awaited them. Lost Planet 2 runs on the MT-Framework 2.0, an updated version of the engine used in several Capcom-developed games.

We normally test at higher settings, but the hardware being evaluated today was not capable of maintaining solid framerates. We are therefore testing at 1080p in DX11 mode with settings on high. DX11 is set to medium.

With these lower settings the hardware struggles to maintain perfectly playable frame rates, dropping to 23 fps during a few environmental sections. the HD6790 is slightly outperformed by the GTX550 Ti, although minimum frame rates are a little higher. In CrossFireX, the HD6790 delivers very capable levels of performance.

Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths.

All settings are pushed to mixed high/ultra settings as shown below

AMD have had a hand in the development of this game and their hardware runs really well, even at demanding settings. The Nvidia GTX550 Ti trails in last place, behind the last generation HD5770.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and it performs well on Nvidia hardware. The GTX550 ti outperforms the HD6790 by around 5 frames per second at these settings. In other games, the HD6790 in CrossfireX can outperform the GTX580, but this time it has to take satisfaction by outperforming the AMD HD6970.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 is an arcade-style flight action game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft. After the events of the first game, the H.A.W.X squadron is sent to Middle East, where a high level of violence is being registered, and the appearance of various insurgents leaders in various hotspots. The team also has to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Russian nuclear weapons. The player will be controlling three groups: one American (Hunter), one British (Munro) and one Russian (Sokov), each with its own pilots and supporting characters. There will also be references to other characters in the Tom Clancy universe.

We are testing in full DX11 mode with all settings to maximum.

Some game titles have a slight slant to either AMD or Nvidia hardware, but HAWX 2 is heavily biased towards Nvidia hardware. Regardless, we can see that in CrossfireX the HD6790's can push an average of over 100 frames per second.

Homefront is speculative fiction, set in a near-future, post peak oil world that features a significantly diminished United States, and a united Korea that has built a massive alliance in East Asia. The Gate Corporation (a major private military company) also plays a minor role. The game focuses on the collapse of the United States, subsequent occupation by the Greater Korean Republic—a united Korea under the rule of Korea—and the American Resistance that fights said occupation. The player is invited to join the American Resistance, “using guerrilla tactics, commandeering military vehicles, and utilizing advanced drone technology”.

Homefront’s PC version has been outsourced to Digital Extremes, a Canadian developer responsible for numerous Unreal Tournament games and Bioshock ports. Frank Delise, the executive producer of the PC version has stated that the PC version of the game will feature exclusive content and dedicated servers. Additional exclusive features include clan support, DirectX 11 graphics, and first person vehicle cockpits.

HomeFront is a fun game which has been critically panned. All of the solutions can power this game reasonably well, although the GTX550 ti has a problem maintaining a 25+fps frame rate at these settings.

We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

This is one of the quieter coolers we have tested in recent months. They say ‘two is better than one' and in the case of this cooler, it certainly proves the point. The fans can spin slower, generating less noise, but keeping the components across the full length of the PCB cool.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 25c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

This cooler is significantly better than the reference design, and even better than the Sapphire HD6790 cooler, which peaked at 72c under Furmark load. The fan idles at only 18 percent and under load peaks at 30 percent.

Return to Idle is a feature we have recently added to our reviews … we measure the time it takes for a solution to return to idle temperatures, immediately after full load. The faster the time, the better the cooler – for example a Noctua NH D14 cooler will return an Intel processor to idle temperatures much faster than a reference cooler. This is a good indication of how quickly a heatsink can dissipate heat.

The dual fans helps disperse the heat faster, and even though the fan speeds are low, the card returns to idle in around 20 seconds.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and record the results.

These results are fairly close to the HD5770, peaking at around 90 watts when gaming. A very efficient design, and under 170 watts when set up in CrossfireX.

To overclock today we used Catalyst Control Center which while limited, allowed us to reach the maximum figures before calling in other tools such as TriXX.

As we experienced before, the core seems to be limited to around 900-910mhz, although this is reasonably healthy and shows safe margins at reference clocks. Any higher than 910mhz and the system would hardlock. If we pushed the memory clocks any higher than 1180mhz we could see artifacting on screen.

The overclock helped push the card past the last generation HD5850.

AMD's HD5770 was a great card, and one I used myself extensively inside a media center for over a year. While it was not a powerhouse solution, it was more than useable for modest late night gaming sessions on a big television. The HD6790 is certainly a noticeable upgrade for HD5770 users, offering improved frame rates and enhanced support for multiple screens within a productivity or work based environment.

The XFX HD6790 is significantly better than the reference AMD design … the custom dual fan, tri heatpipe cooler is the best we have tested for this specific range of cards.

When we look at performance, the £120 Nvidia GTX550 ti simply struggles to compete against the closely priced HD6790. We tried to be as balanced as possible, using four high profile TWIMTBP titles, and to be fair the GTX550 ti won all of these, including HAWX 2 and Far Cry 2. Other games such as Home Front, Resident Evil 5 and Alien V Predator fared better on the AMD hardware.

There is no clear way to indicate ‘overall' performance, but by carefully weighing in a variety of results we can come to some educated conclusions. Many people rely on 3DMark Vantage or 3DMark 11 to get an ‘overview' of hardware performance. We feel there is value in both benchmarks, but neither should be used as a final buying decision. What we can say however is that the HD6790 won both benchmarks, showing that both DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 performance is class leading at this price point.

The key talking point for us today however is the CrossfireX performance, which as we noted before is exceptional. To get it all into context we need to look at some of the results against the high end graphics cards. Two XFX HD6790's cost £230 inc VAT which is £170 less than a GTX580. In many cases, a Crossfired HD6790 configuration manages to outperform the high end Nvidia board. This won't always be the case, but as an inexpensive performance gaming solution there is really some potential for an end user. Buy a card now, then when funds permit, upgrade later for some kick ass frame rate delivery.

The XFX cooler really is fantastic, and while we liked the Sapphire HD6790 cooler, this is even better. The dual fan and direct contact heatpipe design ensure the lowest temperatures we have recorded – around 60c when gaming is a class leading result.

In this lower end sector, the price is much more important than in the high end … margins are tighter, people are always on the lookout for bargains and the climate right now is tough. The XFX HD6790 graphics card is retailing for only £113 inc vat on Scan, which we think is one of the best deals in recent months. The only other card we would think might prove a problem, is the relaunched Sapphire HD5850 Xtreme Edition which is faster, but last generation.

Pros:

• cooler is the best in this class
• noise levels are very low
• power drain is optimised
• CrossfireX performance is fantastic, challenging high end boards
• Its only £113

Cons:

• bundle isn't great.

KitGuru says: The twin fan cooler sets this apart from the competition, it is brilliant.

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