Introduction

If all those NDAs last month weren't already enough for everyone, we start the NDA run for April nice and early. With AMD having taken care of the high end segment with cards like the HD 6970 and HD 6990, while also taking care of that mid-range - high end segment with cards from the HD 6800 series, it was only a matter of time 'till we saw some more mid-range, cheaper cards hit the market.

Considering NVIDIA released the GTX 550 Ti last month and more mid-range models are rumored, it comes as no surprise that AMD are starting to release their line-up. The first comes in the form of the HD 6790. It's clear that the xx30 naming scheme didn't work for them in the past, so it seems they've decided to look at a 50, 70 and 90 line-up now.

The first HD 6790 comes from our good friends at Sapphire and I find myself actually quite interested in testing the model. To be honest, I thought that the GTX 550 Ti would be painfully slow and NVIDIA was just being a bit tail happy with the new Ti prefix, but the card ended up performing much better than I thought and offered some great overall performance.

So the question is, can I find myself pleasantly surprised with the HD 6790? And is it something you should be looking at? Well, there's only one way to find out; but before we look at the performance of the card we'll first check out the package, the card itself and take a deeper look at the specifications to see what exactly is on offer from this card.

Package

Looking at what's on offer here, there's no real surprise with any of it from the smaller packaging to the limited bundle. What was a surprise is the inclusion of two power convertors, not because we're not used to seeing them, but more so that a card that sits below the HD 6850 would still require two power connectors.