AMD Radeon HD 6790 1GB Video Card Review

AMD Radeon HD 6790 1GB Overclocking

To overclock the AMD Radeon HD 6790 graphics card, we used the AMD
Overdrive utility that is part of the CATALYST Control Center. When you
‘unlock’ the ATI Overdrive, you can manually set the clock and memory
settings.

We were able to reach 900Mhz on the core and 1120MHz on the memory before we started having stability issues. We could have gone higher if we increased the GPU Voltage, but to keep things simple we used just the AMD Overdrive utility to see how far we could push this reference card.

To test out the overclock we fired up 3DMark Vantage to see what this overclock was like.

The AMD Radeon HD 6790 Video Card Overclocked 840MHz/1050MHz:

The AMD Radeon HD 6850 Video Card Overclocked 900MHz/1120MHz:

As you can see the 3DMark Vantage score went from X5480 to X5887, which is an improvement of 7% from this mild overclock. Not bad performance, but then we looked back and noticed that we scored X6063 on the AMD Radeon HD 6850 on the same test system. It looks like we need even higher clock speeds to compete with all the extra cores on the Radeon HD 6850!

The AMD Radeon HD 6850 Video Card Stock 775MHz/1000MHz:

Let’s see what it does in real games.

The jump from 840MHz to 900MHz on the AMD Radeon HD 6790 core clock helped boost performance by 6% in AvP at a resolution of 1920×1200. So it looks like a gain of 6-7% can be easily achieved on the Radeon HD 6790 reference design.