Report: AMD to release Radeon HD 6790 this Thursday

[Jos]

AMD is set to introduce a new mid-range graphics card based on the 40nm 'Barts LE' core before the end of the week, according to a report on NordicHardware. The Radeon HD 6790 would directly compete with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 550 Ti, offering a more powerful alternative to Radeon HD 5770 at a lower price than Radeon HD 6850.

Spec-wise the Barts LE core is said to feature AMD's VLIW5 architecture and will get 800 stream processors arranged in 10 streaming multiprocessor units -- which compares to 12 SM units and 960 stream processors in the Barts Pro GPU that powers the Radeon HD 6850. The card also sports 40 Texture Units, a core clock of 840 MHz, a 256-bit memory interface, 1GB of GDDR5 VRAM set to 4200 MHz, two 6-pin PCIe power connectors, and a TDP of 150W -- which oddly enough is higher than the more powerful Radeon HD 6850's rating of 129W and close to the 6870's 151W.

AMD will reportedly launch the new card on March 31. Although there's still no word on pricing, if it is to compete with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti we can expect AMD's latest mid-range offering to hover around the $150 mark.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/43033-report-amd-to-release-radeon-hd-6790-this-thursday.html

 

[SilverCider]

"The Radeon HD 6970 would directly compete with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 550 Ti" - A little typo there

 

[ihaveaname]

... so it uses more power than the 6850? I must be missing something here....

 

[TeamworkGuy2]

ihaveaname said:
... so it uses more power than the 6850? I must be missing something here....

Yea, what's up with that, I am glad I went with a mid range nVidia card (GTS 450), I can look forward to the Ti 550 or GTX 460.
AMD/ATI on the otherhand...
The 6850 is still close to $180, over most people's mid/lower range budgets.
My guess is that the 6690 will be a "knock off" of the Radeon 68xx series, underpowered, slightly over priced card (since its a current generation card and can boast about its Radeon 6xxx family).
I will be waiting to see the details for this card, 150W power envelope is high, quite high for a $150-ish bracket card.

 

[mosu]

The higher power envelope is due to higher clock frequencies, both in core clock and memory clock, 840 MHz vs 775 MHz and 4000MHz vs 4200 MHz.With a 256 bit interface, it looks like a reduced version of 6850 at higher clock speeds, so in certain games it might actually work better than 6850.

 

[dividebyzero]

$150 at the egg. Seems to going up against the GTX460 768Mb (or possibly the GTX560 non-Ti) at that price point.

 

[red1776]

Shouldn't this card be the '6830' ?

 

[dividebyzero]

HD 6790 probably sounds better than HD 6830 - bigger individual numbers for non-tech savvy, and it makes the card sound less like a salvage part. Judging by the reception the 5830 got I couldn't really argue the logic there.

 

[red1776]

HD 6790 probably sounds better than HD 6830 - bigger individual numbers for non-tech savvy, and it makes the card sound less like a salvage part. Judging by the reception the 5830 got I couldn't really argue the logic there.

Good point, the 5830 was neutered a bit too much (cutting the ROP's in half from 32 to 16) and fusing not one but two shader clusters while using more power than the 5850.