Gigabyte Radeon HD7790 (2GB GDDR5) Review

Verdict and Conclusion

At the time of testing I only really had one gripe with this card. The drivers were extremely mediocre to say the least. Granted they were 7790-specific drivers I had qute a few driver crashes going from 13.4 to these drivers. The only thing that really fixed the crashes was formatting my hard drive and re-installing windows as well as my drivers. If you are upgrading from something else be prepared to wipe your OS until AMD puts out a new Catalyst driver with the 7790 integrated.

The card itself is great. Power use is almost non-existant. If you are planning on dropping this card into an HTPC or other low-power type setup you simply cannot go wrong. It offers huge amounts of power and performance for its size and power use. 7750 and 7770 cards had been starved with a lack of memory bandwidth, the 7790 does not fall victim to that problem anymore with higher memory speeds.  Depending on your luck of the draw you might get a card with video memory that does not overclock much due to being rated at the speeds the card comes with.

Overclocking with the Windforce cooler is a breeze. Temps were nice and chilly throughout testing and let us push the card to some decent clocks. With voltage control support this card would really fly. But as-is it seems a bit held back by not being able to really crank the volts. Maybe those with more courage can slap a hard voltage mod on this card and go, but as-is there is still a decent amount of headroom.

Looking around the interwebs the Gigabyte Radeon HD 7790 Windforce edition card comes in at around $160 for the 2GB version that we tested today. If you are planning on running two of them in crossfire that is not too bad. If you are planning on running a single card I would suggest saving yourself $20 and grabbing the 1GB edition since your card will run out of juice before you run out of VRAM. Comapred with other 2GB cards this card is roughly $10-15 cheaper than others which looks good. If you are lookijng at spending that much it might be a good idea to spend the extra and get a 7850 instead.

Good:

• Great cooler
• Nice warranty
• Dual-Fans
• Good games package
• Overclocks nicely
• Uses CGN architecture

Bad:

• Runs out of juice before 2GB comes into play
• No voltage control
• Price

Final Words.

If you are looking for a solid HTPC card that can do gaming at 1080p this card certainly fits the bill. It is not the fastest but power use of this card is downright impressive for the amount of performance per watt you get. I certainly wouldn’t hestitate recommending this card for anyone looking to get into gaming at 1080p.

SCORE

8.4/10

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