Sapphire HD 7790 OC 2GB Edition Video Card Review

Updated: April 22, 2013

When starting this review I found it hard to look at things from an entirely new perspective as we just did a version of this card a couple of weeks back with the only real difference being that now instead of 1GB of GDDR5, we now see 2 on the Sapphire HD 7790. What type of effect will adding a single GB of memory do? Well that is what we are trying to convey in today’s review. Most of the specs can be seen here on our Dual-X HD 7790 1GB review. The real differences in the cards are the cooling, the core clock and the amount of memory being upped a gig from 1GB to 2GB, beyond that its apples to apples.

So lets start of with the cooling, as you can see the cooling on the 2GB version consists of what looks like a lighter version of their Vapor-X cooling with a single fan on the black plastic shroud. This card sizes in at 9-inches by 4-inches by 1.25-inches and takes up two slots in your PC when installed. The core clock has also been dropped by 25MHz, which makes no real sense, but seems to have no real disadvantage over the 1GB version. This card also has additional cooling on the memory to allow for better overclocking and the coolers do a good job in that respect and since the card has built-on shield on the rear side of it, the card has a better chance of dissipating radiant heat from the card, as well as protect it from damage.

The additional 1GB of GDDR5 memory allows the card to run better at higher resolutions like 2560X1440 as well as allowing games to be played with the advanced settings turned up to higher than the 1GB card and still get the same performance from the card. Another thing is scaling, of which I have not had time to do yet with the 2GB version, but scaling should also be improved as well. In our testing we saw that the temperatures of the HD 7790 2GB version to only be slightly higher than the 1GB version. For our testing to be accurate we had to run the tests at the same settings that we run our normal tests like for the first run review in order to maintain the status quo of our test bench. The extra memory is to give gamers that extra boost needed to play games at higher settings and higher resolutions than the 1920X1080p standard that most gamers play at.

Here you can see the photo gallery of the card and its contents that include the drivers CD, the manual, the warranty card, a standard display port cable and a DVI to Analog converter.

Here is our test bench and the performance results that we attained during this round of testing. You can see that the card only performs marginally better on most settings and that falls within the parameters of what we expected.

At the end of the day for the small price difference the Sapphire HD 7790 is the better value as single card performance has a better chance of playing your games with all the bells and whistles turned up without having to sacrifice any real performance. I think that gamers want to get as much performance out of any card they own and given the opportunity to spend less than $20.00 to get that slight performance increase is going to pan out well for Sapphire at the sales counter. Although we did not do the standard tests all over again I will tell you this: At 1920X1080 BF3 could be played on Ultra with only a very negligible difference of a few frames per second so for those who really care about the detail level in their game this is a solid win all around. Just like it’s earlier predecessor this card is priced right and geared for the gamers who wants 1920X1080p gaming at high settings. For the target audience this card is aimed at and for its price this card is a shoe in for our Top Value Award as it does what it says and does it at great price point.