SweClockers has put the upcoming Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 Dual-X graphics card through its paces in their test lab. Based on the preliminary results, it seems clear that the card and its Bonaire GPU will deliver some very impressive performance and provide Nvidia with some solid competition.

The HD 7790 Dual-X is part of Sapphire's line of premium range of AMD graphics cards and features the company's trademark PCB and cooler design that includes a 21.5 cm PCB and aluminum fin-stack heatsink with two 80 mm cooling fans. The card features a single 6-pin PCIe power connector which indicates a maximum draw of 150 W and has two DVI connectors and a single HDMI and DisplayPort output.

Specification Radeon HD 7790 Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition Model Sapphire Dual-X OC Reference GHz Edition GPU Bonaire Cape Verde XT Architecture GCN 28 nm GCN 28 nm GPU Frequency 1,075 MHz (OC) 1,000 MHz Stream Processors 728 pcs 640 pcs Memory Bus 128-bit 128-bit Memory 1 GB GDDR5 1 GB GDDR5 Memory Frequency 6.4 GHz (OC) 4.5 GHz Memory Bandwidth 102.4 GB/s 72 GB/s Fill Rate (pixels) 17.2 GPix/s 16 GPix/s Fill Rate (texel) 51.6 GTex/s 40 GTex/s

SweClockers have so far benchmarked the graphics card in 3DMark 11 and the "Fire Strike" test at 1920 x 1080 using the beta 12.101.2.0 Catalyst drivers. They found that Sapphire's HD 7790 provides comparable performance to AMD's reference HD 7850. In 3DMark 11, the HD 7790 was just 8.7 percent slower than the HD 7850 and 8.3 percent slower in the Fire Strike Test.



The HD 7790 is expected to be released by late March or the middle of April. The Sapphire HD 7790 Dual-X has been reportedly priced at 1200 Kronor excluding VAT ($189).