Technical Data / Specifications

With the ASUS Radeon HD 7790 DirectCU II OC you get a factory overclocked card with a reference PCB cooled by a DirectCU II v2.0 cooler. The ASIC quality measured on our sample was 73.2 % which is on the average.
About ASIC quality:



Looking at the clock speeds we see that the GPU runs at 1'075 MHz. That's the highest you can get out of the box for an HD 7790 and if you take a look at other cards on the market you see that most share the same GPU clock. Like HIS, Sapphire and XFX, ASUS ships its card with the 1'024 MB of GDDR5 memory overclocked at 1'600 MHz (6'400 MHz effective). For the record, AMD's recommended clocks are 1'000 MHz for the GPU and 1'500 MHz for the memory.

nVidia GeForce	Radeon HD 7850	ASUS Radeon HD 7790	Radeon HD 7790	Radeon HD 7770
Chip	Pitcain Pro	Bonair	Bonair	Cape Verde
Process	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	2.80 Billion	2.08 billion	2.08  Billion	1.50 Billion
GPU clock	860 MHz	1'075 MHz	1'000 MHz	1'000 MHz
Memory	2'048 MB GDDR5	1'024 MB GDDR5	1'024 MB GDDR5	1'024 MB GDDR5
Memory clock	1'200 MHz (4'800 MHz)	1'600 MHz (6'400 MHz)	1'500 MHz (6'000 MHz)	1'125 MHz (4'500 MHz)
Memory interface	256 Bit	128 Bit	128 Bit	128 Bit
Memory bandwidth	153'600 MB/s	102'400 MB/s	96'000 MB/s	72'000 MB/s
TMUs	64	56	56	40
Shader Cores	1024	896	896	640
ROPs	32 ROPs	16 ROPs	16 ROPs	16 ROPs
Maximum board power	150 Watt	xx Watt	85 Watt	75 Watt
PCB Type	Reference Design	Reference Design	Reference Design	Reference Design
PCB size	long	short	PCIe16x	PCIe16x
Cooler	Reference Design	DirectCU II v2.0	Reference Design	Reference Design
MSRP	$250	$159	$149	$109

As said previously, this card from ASUS makes use of the reference PCB. Therefore you get an analogue power design with five phases, where the GPU gets four phases and the memory gets one phase.
The voltage regulation chip used for both GPU and memory is a NCP81022 from ON Semiconductor.
On the picture below you can see that unlike the Club3D card we reviewed not long ago the MOSFETs haven't been cooled via a little aluminium heatsink. Since this card belongs to the renown DirectCU 2 series we would have liked to see it but on the other hand the axial fan is blowing air on them directly so an heatsink isn't mandatory.



The cooler that equips the two HD 7790 from ASUS is the same and is a smaller version of the dual slot DirectCU 2 v2.0 cooler that we know from higher-range cards. This one has two 8mm nickel plated copper heatpipes in actual "direct touch" with the core, a few aluminium fins and two 75mm fans.
Although this cooler is a smaller version, it is bigger than the card's PCB by 4.5cm in lenght, which end up with a total card lenght of 21.59cm. Also because of the two heatpipes the cooler is larger by 1.85cm. So if you don't want to run into compatibility issues, make sure that your case is able to receive a graphics card that is 12.95+cm high.



The memory chips used are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1'500 MHz (6'000 MHz effective).

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 13 - DIRT Showdown
Page 2 - Technical Data / Specifications	Page 14 - Far Cry 3
Page 3 - Preview	Page 15 - Max Payne 3
Page 4 - Test Setup	Page 16 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 5 - 3DMark 11	Page 17 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 6 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 18 - The Witcher 2
Page 7 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 19 - Power Consumption
Page 8 - BattleField 3	Page 20 - Fan Speed / Noise Level
Page 9 - Borderlands 2	Page 21 - Temps - Idle / FurMark / BF3
Page 10 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 22 - Performance/Price & Performance/Watt
Page 11 - Crysis 3	Page 23 - Conclusion
Page 12 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2

Discuss this article in the forums