PowerColor Radeon HD 7790 TurboDuo OC 1GB Review

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8Qsh–Mf8Y[/youtube]

Having not worked with a PowerColor product before, I have to be honest and say that I was not quite sure what to expect, in essence it was either going to wow me or leave me feeling a bit disheartened. Sadly though I’ve not been wowed by what the card has to offer. Granted the card looks pretty nice, but even feeling it in my hands, it doesn’t have the same feel of quality to it that say an XFX card with its aluminium housing would.

On the performance side of things, it has to be said that average performance is what is to be expected, right throughout the benchmark results the card was not severely down on performance, but maybe PowerColor could have given a better overclock to notch the card up a stage or to, setting it apart from the rest of the 7790 pack a little – granted you could do this yourself, but for an entry level card that is aimed at potentially entry level users, its the little things like this that stand out. On factor that does work in favour of the TurboDuo is it modest full load power consumption. Topping out at only 215W for the entire system is not bad at all and it does make up for the slightly higher than average idle consumption.

So where do I feel PowerColor could make some adjustments? The cooler is one aspect that can quickly make or break a card, both on the aesthetics and performance. The foundations are there, but on the acoustic and thermal performance side, a slight redesign to the fans could reduce the noise levels and also increase the airflow, thus reducing the core temperatures a few degrees under load a little.

Overall I’m not going to write this card off saying its useless, it does the job, but at an average level. With such a close fought battle in the 7790 market, its having something that is unique or better in some way that drives sales, and having average performance for an average price of £125 doesn’t quite cut it these days. The building blocks are there and maybe a few tweaks and tunes and PowerColor may be able to take on some of the big guns who dominate the market.