Introduction

When NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 550 Ti much of the media, Guru3D.com included, where a little under whelmed by its performance level. NVIDIA prior to launch quickly adapted and lowered the price level to compensate for what was to be their next mid-range product.

AMD on its end figured, heck we can do better for roughly the same price. So they started designing a product tagged as Radeon HD 6790, and is based on the Barts GPU series. AMD is making bold claims that their product is up-to 30% faster to what NVIDIA has to offer. Well, that's not such a hard thing to accomplish considering what the R6790 is made of and the specs it carries, we have no doubt that AMD can pull it off as they have been on NVIDIA's a$$ for a long time now in terms of price versus performance.

Today as such we'll have a look at that Radeon HD 6790, a card that is designed to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 Ti. The HD 6790 is based on AMD's 40 nm "Barts" GPU which is the very same graphics processor used in the Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870. Next to that this product comes with a full 256-bit wide memory bus giving it very nice memory bandwidth and really, aside from slicing some shader processor clusters and ROPs away, this is a R6800 series card.

Armed with plenty of power for a products in the 125 EUR range this product could be just what the doctor ordered for gamers on a budget, have a quick peek at the actual reference sample and then let's head on over into the review.