AMD releases $150 Radeon HD 6790 video card

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: PC / Laptop

AMD announced today that it has released the new Radeon HD 6790 video card, priced at $149 and thus in direct competition with Nvidia's recently released (and same-priced) GeForce GTX 550 Ti.

The Radeon HD 6790 is positioned between the upper-end-mainstream Radeon HD 6770 and the lower-end-enthusiast Radeon HD 6850, intended for users running at midrange resolutions (such as 1,680-by-1,050) and detail settings. The card offers 1.34 teraflops of compute power; has a core clock speed of 840 MHz, 800 stream processors, 40 texture units, and 16 ROPs; and is loaded with 1GB of GDDR5 frame buffer, operating at 4.2 Gbps on a 256-bit memory path.

AMD's press materials for the 6790 identify the 6790's TDP as about 150 watts—more than the 6850, and approximately in the same league as the card above that one, the Radeon HD 6870 (151 watts). AMD's reference spec for the card suggests it will require two six-pin connectors from a power supply, though the company says that some models will be available using only one.

Like the other cards AMD has released in its 6000 series, the 6790 supports the VLIW5 shader architecture, the DirectX 11 API, HD3D for stereoscopic 3D, and Eyefinity for multimonitor gaming.

Cards using the 6790 chipset are available now from AMD's usual add-in-board partners, such as HIS, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX.

We're working on our review of the AMD Radeon HD 6790—check back soon to see how it stacks up against the competition.

This article, written by Matthew Murray, originally appeared on PCMag.com and is republished on Gear Live with the permission of Ziff Davis, Inc.