AMD’s Radeon 7790, codenamed ‘Bonaire’ has been in the retail channels for a few weeks now and from what I gather, it has been welcomed very kindly by the consumers with its good level of performance for its price (as shown by the number of cards that I’ve looked at so far). Whilst the launch is a little while ago now, there are still a few of AMD’s partners that are keen for me to take a look at their cards and see how well they perform in one of the closest fought battles to be the best card that I have seen in a fair while. With different cards each giving their own edge over other brands in terms of overclocking ability, performance, cooling, temperatures and design, HIS have got their work cut out to make their card stand out over the rest.

It has been a little while since I’ve had a play with a HIS card – the last one being a 7750 which was launched right back at the start of last year and as we will see there are always those little things that certain brands stick to; in the case of HIS, this is the use of a green/blue PCB and blue fan – its all part of their colour scheme and it certainly makes their card that bit more distinct.

Whilst some manufacturers have updated their packaging designs over that last year or so, giving them a little bit of a face lift as well as updating the accessories that come with the cards, HIS have kept their accessory bundle pretty much the same as it has been for quite a while with a driver CD, VGA adaptor and manual alongside a flyer that highlights a couple of installation points for novice users.

PowerColor have kept the bundle very simple, with a VGA to DVI adaptor, installation guide and a driver CD. I do note that the CD still displays the ATI branding for some reason, although a guess would be that the image that is printed on to the disc has not been updated in a long time. I’d also recommended going to the AMD website to download the latest drivers.

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With the release of the GTX 770 and the recent launch of the GTX 780, NVIDIA made on fundamental change to their cards over the GTX 690 and Titan. This change is one that may seem simple, but it is one that has a major role in the graphics market and for each of NVIDIA’s partners. This change is the grant to change the PCB layout and most importantly the cooling on the cards. When the GTX Titan was released, NVIDIA put a halt on any non reference designs and in effect the only alteration partners could make was to put a sticker with their name on the card.

The is not the case with the 700 series however, whilst the GTX 770 and GTX 780 used the exact same cooler as seen on Titan, manufacturers are now allowed to deviate from the reference design and put their own mark on their cards to set them apart from the competition. In Gigabyte’s case, the cooler of choice is WindForce and for a number of years now this has been at the forefront of their marketing campaigns.

With the release of the 770, Gigabyte are keen to show off the latest revision of their well known cooler, which now features a metal housing rather than the older plastic design. On top of this, Gigabyte have given the GK104 core the overclock treatment to take the 770 to the next level and let it stretch its legs a bit more.

When it comes to looking at this card, there is little more than the card in a box to look at as this is a review sample, meaning that Gigabyte have omitted the usual gubbins and accessories that we would normally see as part of a graphics card bundle.

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Last week we saw the release of NVIDIA’s latest graphics range – namely the 700 series and its top model, the GTX 780. In many respects the GTX 780 brings a whole new level of performance to a greater audience and as I showed, there is only a small difference between the 780 and Titan on a single screen.

Working through the new 700 series line-up, NVIDIA are now lifting the lid on their next card, the GTX 770. Like the GTX 780, the GTX 770 has had many rumours surrounding its release and like the 780, these are all related to specifications, performance and most of all the GK104 core and a GTX 680. Like the GTX 780 I first of all want to put one of these rumours to rest and state the reason why. The one that I am referring to is the speculation that GTX680 owners would be able to turn their card into a GTX 770 through a BIOS update. Simply put this CANNOT be done. Whilst both cards share the same GK104 GPU core, there are a number of factors that lead to this impossibility. Like the 780 to Titan comparison, the GTX 770 has a slightly different revision of the GK104 core with varying number s of CUDA cores and texture units, however the most significant factor for the inability to ‘convert’ the GTX680 lies with the on-board memory.

One of NVIDIA’s major shouting points with the GTX770 is the inclusion of memory that runs at a whopping 7Gbps at stock, these are no overclocked ICs either, they are entirely new, so unless you have the ability to unsolder and resolder the ICs on to a GTX 680 as well as change the PCB layout slightly, there is no possibility of changing your card from one to the other.

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For many years now, passively cooled components and hardware has been the only real way to get a totally silent computer, and this was more of a dream years ago when cooling solutions were not as acoustically pleasing to the ear, however the furnaces of systems back then also meant that the though of going passive would lead to the wonder if the system would melt under the pure heat that came from the components.

Whilst these days, lets admit it, some components still do run relatively hot, the technology behind fans and air coolers in general has come on leaps and bounds, with the water cooling option now more of a reality for many people which also leads to lower temperatures on the hardware installed.

When it comes to it though, for those that relish the dream of a silent system, there is still only one way of truly doing so, and that is to go passive. Now whilst on the low end of the performance scale with components that have a sub 100W TDP this is a great idea, when we look over that threshold things can start to get a little tricky when it comes to handling keeping the GPU core, in this instance, cool under the collar.

PowerColor are not put off by this challenge though and continuing their line of passive products under the SCS3 title, the last of which was a 6850, they aim to take a second attempt at making a mid range card that doesn’t suffer from the heat that a 130W core can produce.

Inside the box PowerColor like we’ve seen before, keep things nice and simple, including a driver CD that no longer bears the ATI branding that we’ve long been waiting to see finally changed.

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It’s that time of year again where NVIDIA have a new series of cards in the pipelines and as we have seen running up to today, the number of rumours and leaks that have been flying about are as profound as ever. For some this leads to pure confusion as to what is to be seen and what is complete rubbish, and for people like myself it leads to pure frustration as I know all the true facts and figures, meaning that when I see the rumours and false facts floating around I can do nothing but sit and wait until the NDA lifts to put a number of these claims to rest with the real specifications and performance figures behind the new cards.

So here we have it, the GTX 780 – the first in the new line of Kepler based 700 series cards and before we get too far into the nitty gritty of what’s new in the 700 series, I want to make the following fact clear and true – the GTX 780 CANNOT be flashed in any way to effectively turn it into Titan. There are a number of reasons for this; first off, whilst both cards share the same GK110 core, the 780 has far less CUDA cores, is a different revision of the core chip and has less texture units on-board. On top of this, there is also half the amount of video memory and a number of components in the power region of the PCB are missing as the 780 does not require these as opposed to Titan.

Point out of the way, NVIDIA’s new 700 series cards are here to replace the ever popular 600 series, although they are not a re-hash and re-brand of 6xx cards as some may presume. Whilst the GK110 cores may be featured on both 600 and 700 series cards, they will have subtle variances to them, mainly on the front of CUDA core count and texture filters and so forth.

So what is the 780 in relation to the 600 series cards. Whilst it may look like Titan, it is a slightly lower performing card. Titan is more geared towards users with multiple high resolution displays and thus the higher 6GB of GDDR5 memory that it encompasses. The 780 whilst still home to 3GB of GDDR5 is more aimed at users who are going to be gaming on a single screen at high resolutions with all the settings turned to 11. Over its predecessor, the GTX 680, the 780 has 50% more CUDA cores with a count of 2034, 50% more memory, up to 3GB from 2GB and overall a 34% increase in performance. Interestingly enough, GTX 580 users who upgrade to a 780 will see a whopping 70% gain in performance between the two cards and a 25-30% gain can also be found over AMD’s 7970.

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Whilst there have been a few new cards come to the market over the last month or so from both NVIDIA and AMD, there’s always the time available in each manufacturers R&D departments for them to tweak, tune and create new products to bring to market. Normally these come in the form of overclocked cards or those with slightly better coolers, but its very rare to see the release of a card that has been taken back to the drawing board a little more than usual.

In the current climate, there is a growing market for smaller, more compact systems, but at the same time ones that have power – lots of it. Consequently, cases like Bitfenix’ Prodigy have become highly sought after due to their small frame, yet high level of flexibility when it comes to fitting large graphics cards, in fact they’ll take any dual slot card that can be thrown at them, still with room to spare. This however pushes slightly smaller and more compact case out of the market, due to their limiting compatibility with longer cards and thus this leads to a lower spec card having to be used as generally they are smaller then their bigger and more powerful brothers.

With compact cases and limited graphics options available, lets bring forward Asus’ latest weapon to the market in the form of the GTX 670 DirectCU Mini. There’s no guessing required as to what the Mini part of the name means, essentially Asus have chopped or squashed the card, which ever way you prefer to look at it and the result of their efforts is a GTX 670 that packs more punch reference card with its overclock, but is no longer than some entry level cards, measuring a mere 17cm in length – that’s 7.3cm shorter than NVIDIA’s reference GTX 670 designs.

But as you would expect, packing more power into a smaller space poses a nightmare for the cooling department and as a result, Asus have developed a whole new fan design which they’ve called CoolTech. This new fan comprises of two different types of fan, but in a single package, namely the blower and axial fans that are used on graphics cards. This new style of fan generates a far greater cooling effect than a traditional axial fan and also gives a far wider reach than that of a blower fan, thus giving a greater cooling potential.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Inside the box alongside Asus include a quick setup guide, a CD with drivers and GPU Tweak and a twin 6-pin to 8-pin PCIe power adaptor.

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A few months ago I took a look at a product that entered a new line on to the list of different products that I’ve looked at over time. This is namely AVerMedia’s RECentral Live Gamer HD - a PCI Express based hardware encoder that takes the effort out of video capture with a simple plug and play installation and a instant record button that connects via USB.

Following on from this bit of kit that ticked all the boxes for me, AVerMedia’s R&D teams have been busy working away, thinking a little outside of the box and this brings us forward to what I’ve got to look at today.

Whilst the PCI-e based capture card is a great bit of kit, there is one slight downfall (if you was to see it as one) in that if you’re capturing footage from say a games console such as the Xbox 360 or PS3, you need to have your PC nearby in order to capture the footage. If you’re at a LAN event such as Multiplay’s Insomnia series or you’re popping round to your mates house for a gaming session, the prospect of having to lumbar an extra system around isn’t exactly going to rate well and the thought of having a compact portable alternative is music to the ears for many gamers. Fear not as this is exactly what AVerMedia have done.

Gearing the LGP for a whole heap of different sources, AVerMedia include quite an extensive set of cables with the device. These include (from left to right) component A/V, a short HDMI to HDMI, USB, 2.5mm to 3.5mm audio and a PS3 to A/V cable. On top of all this, there is a carry case for the recorder, which I have to say feels really nice with its suede texture and also a 3-month subscription to XSplit for live broadcasting. Drivers and software can be downloaded from the AVerMedia product page, meaning you will always have the latest set of drivers when you come to install.

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There a whole heap of partners that work with AMD to manufacture graphics cards and with the release of the 7790, I’ve looked at a card from virtually every major player in the market. It’s very rare that this happens to be quite honest as I typically only see three or four cards at a time for each class of card but there’s nothing wrong in breaking the mould a little and overall getting one of the most extensive data sets for Bonaire going.

PowerColor is a partner that I’ve not worked before, but this is not to say that their product is not worth looking at. The then ATI partner, who are owned by TUL, have been producing cards since 1997 and in some respects are a little unheard of these days when compared to the big names such as Asus and Gigabyte to name a few and be-known to some have also produced cards from NVIDIA, although this was done under the Zogis brand name.

With the release of the 7790, like may other partners, we see more than one SKU appear on the market by the brand with two slightly different overclock variants in that. The TurboDuo that I’m going to look over today is the faster and in a way, the better of the two, with a better cooling option and also a higher clock speed out of the box, but the real question is how does it stack up when pitted against the armada of 7790′s that I’ve already seen and tested…

PowerColor have kept the bundle very simple, with a VGA to DVI adaptor, installation guide and a driver CD. I do note that the CD still displays the ATI branding for some reason, although a guess would be that the image that is printed on to the disc has not been updated in a long time. I’d also recommended going to the AMD website to download the latest drivers.

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There’s been a whole heap of 7790′s coming through my door recently and it doesn’t look like the flow is going to stop just yet. Never before have I had so many partners eager to get their products tested and reviewed for a particular launch, but as we know, Bonaire has stirred the entry level market right up and consequently every one wants a slice of the pie when it comes to sales. When it comes to the review side of things, what this means for both myself and you, the reader, is the I can give a better representation and judgement on how different cards perform and show their worth.

Next to come to the table with their version of the 7790 is XFX. After a little time of not seeing one of their cards with the Double Dissipation cooling system, Ghost thermal technology and in the case of the particular card that I’m looking at today, hand picked and binned components which mean that they have been selected for the Black Edition moniker that XFX pride themselves for as their top of the line range.

So what’s the advantage of chip binning I hear you ask; well only a few manufacturers sell cards that have hand picked and selected components, but these components that have been selected are in essence the cream of the crop and perform the best when tested, which for you the user means that when it comes to performance, they have just the little bit more to give. For the over clocker it means that there is potential for pushing it that little bit further as I will come on to later whilst consuming less power.

XFX tend to keep their bundles quite simple, but whilst this means that the box contains mostly paperwork, along with a Black Edition case badge, it also means the cost of having to include accessories that most users will keep in the box is eliminated, bringing the cost to the end user down at the same time.

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Having looked at a number of choices for the 7790 from MSI, Sapphire and Club3D, its time to see what is on offer from Asus and when we mention Asus, what comes to mind is DirectCU. We’ve seen some manufacturers use their own design of coolers across their own product ranges, but no-one it seems has been more successful at this over Asus. Bar only minor design tweaks to cater for different cards, the DirectCU II coolers inherently all look pretty much a part of the same family, each shrouded by the iconic black metal frame and three red stripes that run along the breadth of the cooler.

So what sets DirectCU apart from the competition ? Well we’ve found time and time again that they are some of the most efficient when it comes to cooling, especially on the acoustics front, with the top four spots on the charts taken up by a cooler of this design. This naturally gives this cooler a chance to join that group. On the basis of Bonaire, we’ve seen some impressive results to date and knowing that Asus don’t like to displease their huge following of users, I’m sure there is going to be something special hidden somewhere inside this card.

In a standard Asus fashion, we find the box decorated with an artistic breakdown of the cooler and the moniker three claw slashes that run to the top right hand corner. Inside we also find a standard accessory set that includes a legacy display adaptor, CrossFire bridge, driver CD with GPU Tweak and a setup guide.

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Having seen that AMD’s new Bonaire core has taken to the market a lot better than anticipated with its high level of performance, relative to its price, its very much worth looking at what other options that there are to chose from over the Sapphire and Club3D cards that I’ve already looked at. Next to the line with their over clocked edition card is MSI. Whilst I’ve typically looked at cards from the upper end of the graphics spectrum from MSI, including their GTX670 Power Edition and GTX680 Lightning, its been a long while since I’ve look at a card that sits lower down in their range, let alone an AMD offering at that.

Like many other cards that I look at, this one as mentioned has had an overclock giving it a boost of power over what AMD provide, and with a core clock of 1050MHz and a memory clock of 1500MHz, we should be seeing this card sit mid point between the cards from the brands mentioned above. What could be potentially interesting later on is seeing how well this card over clocks. Whilst this is not normally hot topic of a review, like all other cards that I review, this will be pushed further using MSI’s own afterburner software and given the response I’ve had from their own cards in the past within Afterburner, there is the pre-empted expectation that this will clock better than the other 7790′s that I’ve already pushed – this though is to be found out, after all I could be proved wrong as a lot of it is down the old fable of the silicon lottery.

Afterburner is the buzz word on the front of MSI’s blue and white box with the main focus around displaying the over clock that comes on the card and inside with the card we get a fairly standard set of accessories including driver CD and guide, power adaptor and legacy display adaptor.

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This week has been a big one in the graphics card market, with two new cards launched from both the major players our there – namely AMD and then NVIDIA. The launch of the 7790 was one that AMD intended to shake the market up with, and following my review on Sapphire’s 7790 and then a review on two of Club3D’s 7790′s in CrossFire and seeing that they perform a whole lot better than I expected compared to when I read about them, it’s now time to see how just one of Club3D’s cards perform in relation to Sapphires offering.

It has been a little while since I’ve looked at a card from Club3D, but following CeBIT I’m happy to announce that there will be many more cards to come from them and we can take a look across their range. For those that may or may not have noticed, Club3D have one of the most unique line-ups that I’ve seen on the market and it not only stands out, but it simplifies working out where a product lies within that range. For those that don’t know what I’m taking about, I’m referring to their poker series. When a game of poker is played, the top cards are the pictures, in other words, jack, queen, king and ace. Club3D have taken this ordering and given the fact that their club logo fits in with the club suit in a deck of cards, we find an ideal pairing right there.

What this translates to and to give an example, two identical looking 7970′s could be laid in front of me for example but one could be a RoyalQueen and one a RoyalKing, going by the order of cards, I will be be to identify that the RoyalKing is a higher spec of card and is therefore better than a RoyalQueen, simple, effective and gets people talking.

Moving on from the Poker range, we move over to the new 13Series products that Club3D have started to ship. Simply put, 13Series products are effectively white box goods that include nothing more than the card itself. The cards themselves offer the same level of performance, but there are no accessories, manuals or additional materials in the box, making them ideal for system builders and integrators who would only end up sticking all the unwanted extras to one side. To reflect the white box status, the cards will come with a lower shipping price to suit.

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There are various areas that a graphics card product can be aimed at, and this includes the budget segment, mid-range and high-end, but we also have to look at the offerings that give fantastic performance for a great price, no matter whether they are the best performer or a run-of-the-mill card. The 650 Ti Boost from Nvidia is aimed at that segment, by wanting to offer up 1080p rich quality with high graphical settings, and still letting the user witness admirable frame rates. In Nvidia’s eyes, the 650 series of cards was planned to be the “gateway” for gamers, as it was meant to allow them to experience 1080p gaming for the first time but sadly there was something lacking and is was the raw compute power of the core.

Recently we saw AMD releasing their 7790 “Bonaire” graphics card to rival the original GTX 650 graphics card, but with a refresh offering more performance and some newer Nvidia technology, that we’ve seen lately applied to the GTX Titan, do Nvidia have the card they originally wanted in their 650 series lineup? The specs seem to suggest that it does with 768 CUDA cores, and a 192-bit memory interface, with our particular review today focussing on a 2GB overclock model. The stock 980MHz base clock gives a 5% increase over the original GTX 650 Ti and we see a higher texture fill rate of 62.7 Gigatexels/sec.

The Asus model we are looking at today however, is an OC edition, meaning that we have an even higher clock that surpasses the reference speeds, and includes their patented DirectCU II cooling solution which has given us some amazing results in the past. Lets see if the new GTX 650 Ti can outperform the AMD Radeon HD 7790 and if adding the new technology and improved performance really does make a difference.

Within the box we find the standard array of included accessories with a speed setup guide, VGA/DVI adapter and twin Molex to 6-pin PCI-Express power adapter. No driver CD came bundled with our sample, but this may not reflect the final retail product, but we would always advise to get the latest drivers from the Nvidia website to stay up-to-date.

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Following our recent review on the 7790 from Sapphire, we also have a couple of cards from Club3D but as a change to the normal routine of looking at a single card first then looking at how two of their cards perform together, I’ve decided to see how far the 7790 will go when taken to the max, which in this case is a two way configuration.

To re-cover a couple of points about the 7790, its placement in the market is a gap that as emerged between the 7770 and the 7850, which as some may know is where NVIDIA’s GTX 650Ti came in both on performance and also the price point as well. Because of this, AMD released the 7790 in order to fill the gap in from their side, but to also take on the 650Ti, which as I showed in the Sapphire review, its didn’t just beat, it blew its rival out of the window.

As we know though, single card performance is one thing, but how do things fair when we add additional cards in to the mix? If a single 7790 can perform just below its bigger brother the 7850, then where in comparison will two cards lie? As we know, AMD’s cards tend to scale up to 2x when put into a two way configuration so given this known scale, lets get locked and loaded and see what damage two of these mighty little cards can do.

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Not too long ago we heard the announcement that AMD were to bring out a new 7000 series card that would fill in a gap in their product line-up to take on NVIDIA’s 650Ti GPU. This card is of course the 7790 and goes by the code name “Bonaire”. Like we saw way back when the 6790 was released, the 7790 fills the void between the entry level 7770 and the midrange 7850 which is a slightly larger gap than some may think in terms of performance.

We have heard that NVIDIA are supposed to be updating the 650Ti in order to keep up with this new card, so already before we look closer at the card, we can imagine that there is something to be seen at that for current 650Ti’s on the market, the 7790 is a force to be reckoned with. At stock the Bonaire cards will come with a 1GHz core clock speed and a memory clock of 1500MHz, but what makes the cores that much different is the finer details that lie within the GPU core.

The 28nm core hosts  2.08 billion transistors and 896 stream processors giving it 1.79TFLOPS of compute performance, which when compared to the 7770′s 1.28TFLOPS of performance, is a huge gain indeed. On top of this the 1GB of GDDR5 memory runs on a 128-bit interface and gives 96GB/s of bandwidth. Given all this extra performance the card still operates with a typical board power of only ~85W.

Alongside the card we find a typical Sapphire accessory lineup with a set of leaflets for installation, warranty and registration, a CrossFire bridge, DVI to VGA adapter  HMDI cable, case sticker, power adapter and driver CD.

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