Gigabyte HD 7790 WindForce OC 2GB Graphics Card Review

Introduction

AMD’s HD 7790 graphics emerged on the scene roughly at the same time as Nvidia’s GTX 650 Ti Boost graphics card. The AMD HD 7790 was released to fill that rather large performance void left between the HD 7850 and HD 7770 using a specially designed GPU called Bonaire. The Gigabyte graphics card that we have here today represents the HD 7790 pushed to the best it can offer. We have Gigabyte’s 2GB variant of the HD 7790 with the WindForce cooling solution and a factory overclock, more specifically we have the GV-R7790OC-2GB Revision 1.1 graphics card.

We say its the “best that the HD 7790 can offer” because Gigabyte have maxed out supported GDDR5 memory by adding 2GB and they have put a rather beefy dual 100mm fan WindForce cooling solution on it. Furthermore, Gigabyte have taken the stock clock of 1GHz and raised that by 7.5% to 1075MHz. The 2GB of GDDR5 over the 128bit interface runs at the default 6GHz effective memory speed, so no overclocking there. Despite the overclock Gigabyte have recommended just a 450W power supply as a minimum for this unit while AMD recommends 500W.

In terms of features this card packs most of AMD’s high end features such as Direct X 11.1 support, GCN architecture, AMD Eyefinity support (up to six displays supported), AMD App Acceleration, AMD HD3D technology, AMD CrossFire (max 2 way), AMD PowerPlay, AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore. The main stand-out features are Eyefinity and HD3D support on such a budget GPU.

The box points out the main features which are the overclock, WindForce cooler, Eyefinity support and GCN implementation.

The back has the usual marketing information which you can read if it takes your fancy.

Included is a quick install guide, driver/software utility CD and a dual molex to single 6 pin power supply adapter cable.