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Am I the only one who gets confused by AMD's naming scheme? Do you know how
many times I've had to reshoot part of a video because I was like, today we're
going to be having a look at the 7970 versus the 7790 or the 7770 or the 799.
I mean, they're all there's only two numbers that change. They should just
call him like the, you know, rejuvenator
and like the like the the the the
Bushmaster or like things like that. They should have names like pocket
knives. Anyway, this is the 7790, which
is slightly better than the 7770, but
not nearly as good as the 7970. This is one from MSI. It is an overclocked
graphics card, which basically means that it comes with a higher default clock speed than a stock one from
directly from AMD would if you could buy something like that and the year wasn't
sort of 2006. Um, it has 1 gig of GDDR5,
although this GPU is available with more memory, and I might recommend stepping
up to the 2 gig one if it doesn't cost that much more. It's uh PCI Express 3.0,
DirectX11. It supports AMD Infinity, all those good things. And here we are. So,
we've got a piece of foam here that keeps it in place. We've got a graphics
card here that puts your games in their place. And we've got a couple of little
adapters. I remember when graphics cards used to have a lot of different stuff in
the packages. And honestly, I don't really miss those days because nowadays
they come with exactly what you need and not a whole lot more. Now, this card is
not based on exactly the same core as the 7770 and the 7750. And it's also not
based on the same core as the 7850 and the 7870. In fact, the rumor on the
street is that this would have been an 8000 series card if things had gone
slightly differently for it and it would have been more like a replacement for a
7770 as a next generation architecture. And it kind of aligns with that rumor in
terms of the performance. Although I can neither confirm nor deny whether that
was ever true or not because quite frankly I actually don't know. So, there
you go. I don't even know why I bothered talking about that. MSI includes little
dust covers on all of the connectors. So, you don't have to worry about any kind of corrosion or like um you know,
biohazardous leeches
eating the connectors while it's in transit or whatever else could possibly
happen to a DVI connector while it's sitting in a box. Uh, it also gives you
if you're ever storing the card, like if you want to keep it on like a trophy
shelf, like if you want a tournament with this card and you wanted to like
put it somewhere and keep it on display, then you could cover up the connectors
so that they don't get covered in dust or something like that. You know what? Why don't I just stay focused from now
on? So, we've got a 100 mm cooling fan that uses MSI's propeller blades. So,
you can tell from the uh the tip on there. So, these are designed to push a
little bit more air flow than standard blades. Remember, cooling graphics cards
is a bit of a challenge because of the form factors that are necessary. This is
a two slot card and so you often end up using thin fans that aren't really able
to do much in terms of static pressure. You also often end up with very dense
fin arrangements. So, it's incredibly important to design a fan that is able
to deliver ample pressure in order to push air through these fins and actually
cool the GPU as well as the other components of the card itself. The
shroud is plastic, but it has kind of a nice look to it. MSI has really done a
great job with their styling over the last few years. So, there's a solid
aluminum block here that is attached to some aluminum fins up here. And then
there are two heat pipes that appear to be direct touch heat pipes. So, those
are contacting the GPU core directly. And they then carry heat out to the
aluminum fin arrangement here as well as here. Now, you can see into the back of
the card there's some components that look like they're going to get some incidental cooling from the fan itself
as well as your single six pin PCI Express connector. Then over here we've
got another heat sink that's attached directly to the PCB. That's going to be
for your VRM. So they're actually bringing power into the board at the
back and then turning it into the different voltages that the board itself
can use that the chips on board can use right over here. So that's some sort of
fancy routing, but it's not the first time we've seen this, particularly on
these shorter length PCI Express cards. So you can see the card itself isn't
much longer than a PCI Express slot. And
I think that's pretty much all there is to say about that. Okay. Cooler. Yep. On
the back, we find we're going to be exhausting some of the air outside the
case, but like most custom cooled cards, this one exhausts most of the air inside
the case. So, make sure you have adequate ventilation. Two DVI ports and
HDMI and DisplayPort ports ensure that this card is able to support AMD's
iinity. So, that means multiple displays, and they really do have the
best driver support for this guys. If you want a game across multiple
displays, it's probably a good idea to grab an AMD card. However, don't buy
this one. If you're going to buy this one, buy the 2 gig version because even
older games once you start playing at extremely high resolutions stand a
pretty good chance of utilizing all of that video memory that they have
available to them. 1 gig is really not going to be enough for you there. It
does support Crossfire. So, there's a single Crossfire connector on the top of
the card, meaning it's going to be compatible with two-way configurations.
And this is something that I haven't really seen on an MSI card before, but
it looks like they don't want you removing that stock CPU cooler. So, your
warranty will be void on this card if you remove that and take off the cooler.
However, it should be noted that these low-end cards, particularly the
aftermarket PCB ones, are usually not compatible with liquid coolers anyway,
particularly full cover ones. And if you're going to spend the money on a liquid cooler, a full cover blocks 100
bucks plus. So, I wouldn't be doing it on a card that doesn't cost that much
more than $1 to $170.
So, there that's my tech tip of the day. Don't forget to subscribe to Lana's Tech
Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. And don't forget to check out my review of this card,
MSI's 7790C,
which is also on my channel.