 This video is brought to you by CM Storm, preferred choice of mice headsets and mechanical keyboards of Curse Gaming. Visit www.coolermaster-usa.com slash team underscore curse for more details. Welcome to our video review of the 7790. Now it took us a little while to get our hands on this card, so we weren't able to get one until MSI got us a 7790 OC. Now bear in mind that whether it's OC'd or not OC'd or 90210'd or whatever else it happens to be, we overclock every card we get our hands on anyway, and we keep them all within sort of a reasonable overclocking expectation, like you could probably get something close to those settings if you follow the usual procedure for overclocking. And so yeah, we don't really sort of worry too much about any of that. So let's start with our overall test platform. We've got a 3930K, which is overclocked to 4 GHz. We've got a P9X79 Deluxe motherboard, 16 gigs of Kingston HyperX memory, a Corsair H100 liquid cooler to handle that overclocked 6-core, an Antec HCP 1000 watt power supply, it's 80 plus platinum, a 128 gig Vertex 4 SSD, and last but not least, the graphics cards, which vary. So the one that we have left on here right now, I believe, is our 7870 Hawk. Yes, that is indeed the card we have. So we are going to be using our usual methodologies for all the games you see, and we're going to put annotations next to them as each game comes up to let you guys know how you can replicate our results so you can take your own hardware and see if you can produce the same sort of benchmark run, which you should be able to, and you can compare your own hardware to what you're using. So without any further ado, we're going to launch into our first game. So Bioshock Infinite is a very new, very exciting title, and it looks like the 7790 performed about 10, 12% worse than the GTX 650 Ti Boost. Now, both of these cards launched at almost the same time. The 650 Ti Boost came in right after the 7790 had had a great launch and was very disruptive because it wasn't much more expensive. It had 2 gigs of RAM, whereas the stock 7790 had 1 gig of RAM. However, you can get it in 2 gig configurations. And yeah, it wasn't that much more expensive. So the 7790 is kind of like an amped up 7770 or a 7850 that's been crippled a little bit, and you can see it falls right exactly in between those two cards, and I mean, a little bit under the 650 Ti Boost. So everything performs pretty much exactly where it should. We ran all of our tests at 1080p as per our usual procedure, especially for cards like this that are intended to be run at 1080p. So for Far Cry 3, we found that the 7790 performed pretty much right in line with the GTX 650 Ti Boost. This makes sense. I mean, this I consider a win for the 7790 because it's only a 1 gig card and because it did manage to perform the same. And you can see that we've taken cards, the next cards up, and the next cards down from both the green and the red team, so you can see how those compare. The 7770 still does quite well, only performing about 20% lower than the 7790, and the 650 really didn't put up a very good fight at all in this one. For Metro 2033, you see the 7770 looks really good, the 7790 looks a little bit better than that, and the 650 Ti Boost looks a little bit better than that, which is pretty much exactly where we'd expect them to fall. However, we can still kind of call this a win for the 7790 because the 650 Ti Boost doesn't perform better enough to justify its additional cost. With that said, the 650 Ti Boost only really gets the benefit from that extra memory, which does cost more to manufacture when you actually require it, so when the textures of the game fill up 1 gig VRAM and can overflow it to the point where it'll cripple that card's performance. In Witcher 2, we saw what may be an example of that, where the 7790 really didn't perform that much better than a 7770, only about 10%, whereas the 650 Ti Boost pulled out significantly away from both of them by about 15%. But again, hard to say how much of that is the actual power of the GPU and how much is the additional VRAM. The 650 really trailed in this one, and the 7770 put up a pretty good fight. Finally, our last game is Crisis 3, but kind of run Crisis, and the answer is yes, it sits pretty much exactly where it belongs within the product stack in this one, and there are no surprises there. So what does all this mean? Well, depending on your budget, if you want to spend $150, plus or minus, get a 7790. If you wanted to spend a little bit more than that, maybe about $175, you can get a 650 Ti Boost. Both of them are an excellent value, and if you wanted to spend even less than that, the 7770 continues to be our lightweight champion at only around $120 and giving you most of the performance of the next tier up of cards, and much better than what the green team has to put forward at that price point, which was the GTX 650 at $115. Now, we take all of our pricing as the second lowest price on NCIX.com to give you guys some ideas. So if you kind of go, oh, well, the retailer near me has these prices, I'll go, okay, yes, they do, that's fine. But that's not our methodology for taking pricing and comparing these cards. So in conclusion, the 7790 offers up not much in terms of surprises. It does support iFINITY. It does have excellent power efficiency as well as quiet operation, and you get what you pay for. Thanks for checking out this video on Linus Tech Tips, and as always, don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.