MSI Radeon HD 7790 OC Edition 1GB Graphics Card Review

We’ve seen some big fans on graphics cards and this time round its MSI’s turn to stick one on one of their cards. The massive 10cm fan with Propeller Blade technology serves a dual purpose by providing high airflow to the relatively small cooler whilst keeping noise right down, something that high end coolers fall back on. The other thing we note is the the rear I/O plate that bends back towards the cooler blending the two parts of the card together in a a we thought through design.

Looking closer at the fan, the propeller blade technology can be seen a little clearer on the end of each blade to reduce noise and increase airflow to the relatively thin cooler that lies underneath.

Tucked tight up in the top corner of the card is the 6-pin power connector. It would be nice to see more manufacturers following in the footsteps of Asus who reverse mount the connector for easier removal later on.

Display outputs come with a standard array of options with both single and dual link DVI, HDMI and a full sized DisplayPort. Unlike other cards, MSI are a little unique in that they have blue DVI ports instead of black as we would normally see. This doesn’t mean that they are any different in operation, but its nice to see the colour scheme used work right through to the finer details.

Like we often see with over clocked cards, MSI have left the memory at its reference clock speed of 1500MHz, (6GHz effective) and in this case the core has been raised to 1050MHz from the reference 1000MHz.