Accordingly while we can still take a look at the performance of the card, our power, temperature, and noise data will not match any retail card вЂ“ power consumption should be very close however.ДЄt 150W AMD is skirting the requirement for 2 PCIe power sockets. Instead all of AMDвЂ™s partners will be using their own in-house designs, so weвЂ™ll be seeing a variety of coolers and PCBs in use. The card being sampled to the press is based on the 6870вЂ™s cooler and PCB, as the 6790вЂ™s 150W TDP is almost identical to the 151W TDP of the 6870, however like the 5830 no one will be shipping a card using this design. Or to compare it to the 5770, it has 98% of the shading/texturing capacity, 98% of the ROP capacity, and 175% of the memory bandwidth, not accounting for the architectural differences between Barts and Juniper.ДЇurther extending the 5830 comparison, as with the 5830 AMD is leaving the design of the card in the hands of their partners. Overall the 6790 has 90% of the shading/texturing, 54% of the ROP capacity, half the L2 cache, and 105% of the memory bandwidth of the 6850. With 800 SPs and 16 ROPs operating at 840MHz, on paper the 6790 looks a lot like a Radeon HD 5770 with a 256bit bus, albeit one thatвЂ™s clocked slower given the 6790вЂ™s 1050MHz (4.2GHz data rate) memory clock.ДЇrom the 5830 we learned that losing the ROPs hurts far more than the SPs, and weвЂ™re expecting much of the same here total pixel pushing power is halved, and MSAA performance also takes a dive in this situation. As is to be expected, the 6790 is further cut-down from the 6850, losing 2 SIMD units and half of its ROPs mitigating this some are higher clockspeeds for both the core and the memory. Launching today is the Radeon HD 6790, the 3 rd tier Barts part and like the rest of the Barts-based lineup, the direct descendent of its 5800 series counterpart, in this case the Radeon HD 5830. This does not mean that a 3 rd tier card canвЂ™t be good вЂ“ the Radeon HD 4830 and GTX 260 C216 were fairly well received вЂ“ but itвЂ™s a difficult hurdle to overcome. The GTX 465 and Radeon HD 5830 embodied this with power consumption of a 1 st tier card and the performance of a last generation card, which made them difficult to recommend.

But where do 3 rd tier products come from? ItвЂ™s everything that couldnвЂ™t pass muster as a 2 nd tier product вЂ“ more damaged units functional units that wonвЂ™t operate at lower voltages like a 2 nd tier product. While 2 nd tier products are largely composed of salvaged GPUs that couldnвЂ™t make it as a 1 st tier product, the lower power requirements and prices make the resulting video card a solid product. The problem with 3 rd tier products is that theyвЂ™re difficult to balance 1 st tier products are fully enabled parts that are the performance kings, and 2 nd tier products are the budget minded parts that trade some performance for lower power consumption and all that follows. AMD and NVIDIA both launched such products based on their high-end GPUs вЂ“ Cypress and GF100 respectively вЂ“ and the resulting Radeon HD 5830 and GeForce GTX 465 were eventually eclipsed by the GeForce GTX 460 that was cooler, quieter, and better performing at the same if not lower price. So just how well does the 6790 stack up in the crowded $150 price segment? LetвЂ™s find out.ДЈ rd tier products didnвЂ™t get a great reputation last year. As weвЂ™ll see NVIDIA had good reason to drop the price on the GTX 550 if they didnвЂ™t already, but at the same time AMD must still deal with the rest of the competition: NVIDIAвЂ™s GTX 460 lineup, and of course AMD itself. Based on the same Barts GPU that powers the Radeon HD 6800 series, this is AMDвЂ™s customary 3 rd tier product that weвЂ™ve come to expect after the 48. AMD is launching a new card, the Radeon HD 6790, at that same $150 price point.

The timing for this leads into todayвЂ™s launch. The average price of the cheaper cards is now around $130, a more fitting price given the cardвЂ™s performance. IвЂ™m not sure in what order things happened вЂ“ whether it was a price change or a competitive card that came first вЂ“ but GTX 550 Ti prices have finally come down for some of the cards. As you may recall the GTX 550 Ti launched at $150, a price tag too high for its sub-6850 performance.

The last couple of weeks after the recent GeForce GTX 550 Ti launch have been more eventful than I had initially been expecting.

Amd radeon hd 6700 series vs 560