XFX HD 7790 Black Edition OC Review

As previously mentioned, on top of the over clock that XFX use on this card, there are the hand selected components which are top of their game. This means that when it comes to over clocking, there is greater potential for pushing the Bonaire core further than I have previously.

Using my favourite GPU over clocking tool; MSI’s Afterburner, after a bit of gradual work to get the card to the same speed as I’ve previously achieved with a card from Asus, it surpassed the 1290MHz speed that was achieved by the former and started to creep towards the 1300MHz mark. Sadly though this was not going to happen even after a lot of persistence and failed runs in 3DMark11.

Dropping the core clock back slowly saw the card run stable at 1295MHz and moving on to the memory, this is where the card cam back and surprised me. The hand picked components came into their element here and after many successful runs and increases in speed, the card eventually topped out at 1800MHz (7.2GHz) One seriously impressive over clock.

Whilst over clocking this card I naturally see the score within 3DMark going up after each run and from the stock result of X1696, the score started to jump rapidly and very close towards the X2000 barrier. After setting a target of 1300MHz on the core and sadly failing, the target of trying to get X2000 purely from a GPU over clock was set, but again this was a so near but so far affair with nothing more than X1991 possible.

This result however from the 20.5% increase on the core clock and 12.5% gain on the memory clock works out to give a 17.4% gain in 3DMark 11 performance which is very impressive indeed.