Gigabyte HD 7790 WindForce OC 2GB Graphics Card Review

Final Thoughts

This isn’t the first AMD HD 7790 we have taken a look at and no doubt it will not be the last either, that is until AMD replaces it with something newer. AMD’s HD 7790 falls in between Nvidia’s GTX 650 Ti and GTX 650Ti Boost in terms of pricing which is fair because the AMD HD 7790 performs in between those two cards. The particular Gigabyte version we have here today, the GV-R779OC-2GD, is priced at £125 from one of our trusted retail partners. Considering HD 7790s start from £105-110 this makes the Gigabyte version certainly more expensive than competing solutions. The main reason for this is the implementation of 2GB of VRAM over 1GB. However, I disagree with this choice because our results show very little gain from going to 1GB to 2GB. In fact our results show that a 1GB HD 7790 with overclocked memory actually does better than this 2GB HD 7790 with stock clocked memory. There were a few instances where the extra frame buffer benefited results such as in 3DMark 13 and Sleeping Dogs however the overall picture is that games are more orientated to faster GDDR5 than more of it, even up to 5760 x 1080 resolutions.

In terms of what Gigabyte have done to this card there are both a lot of positives and negatives from my experiences with the card. On the positive side our results clearly show the Gigabyte HD 7790 cooling solution is highly effective and those huge 100mm fans give impressive cooling performance with low noise. This is great news for gamers who don’t like having vacuum cleaner sounds coming out of their PC. However, on the negative side I was just disappointed to see stock VRAM because it gave weak performance compared to overclocked-VRAM cards. I was also unhappy to see just how large this card is, being a HD 7790 it is supposed to be small and low power and ideal for smaller form factor systems but at 10.5 inches long its actually a bit of a beast in size which isn’t necessarily a problem but when you can get a smaller solution that is equally as fast if not faster – then it becomes a problem. Finally the low overclocking limits also saddened me because it really throttled this card’s full potential and almost makes the advanced cooling solution a little bit wasted. I know this limit is set by AMD but you would of hoped vendors would develop their own custom BIOS to get around such limits.

A final thought worth considering is that the Gigabyte GV-R779OC-2GD is part of AMD’s Never Settle Forever game bundle. This allows you to pick a single free game from the choice of Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Dirt 3 and Dirt Showdown. While it is only a single free game it certainly adds extra value over competing Nvidia solutions which in the lower end of the GTX 650 Ti (Boost) cards Nvidia does not offer free games for the most part. You must of course purchase from participating retailers such as Scan.co.uk.

Pros

• Great temperatures
• Relatively quiet
• Never Settle Forever Bronze free game
• 3 year warranty
• Easily reaches CCC overclocking limits

Cons

• Over-sized for a HD 7790
• Blue PCB
• 2GB of VRAM adds little to performance and a lot to costs
• Stock VRAM speeds
• Low CCC overclocking limits

eTeknix says: “Gigabyte’s HD 7790 WindForce OC graphics card is an above-average implementation of the HD 7790. It offers solid performance, great cooling and great acoustics. Though the choice to implement 2GB of memory instead of 1GB seems to have backfired slightly as it has only served to increase the cost of the product compared to the 1GB competition while performance has remained at 1GB levels as the vast majority of games can’t even take advantage of the extra VRAM – even at the highest resolutions. We feel that going for 1GB of overclocked VRAM instead of 2GB of VRAM would of been a much smarter and better value choice. That issue combined with the unattractive blue PCB and over-sized design means that we can’t help but feel there are better HD 7790s out there. Consumers should consider that if they can succcessfully overclock VRAM to CCC limits they will be able to have one of the best HD 7790s on the market, we just feel Gigabyte should offer this out of the box.”

Thank you to Gigabyte for providing this review sample.