Radeon HD 6790 

price/performance. Should you want even more performance, then overclocking can be done easily.

So depending on whether you are willing to go with last-gen, which is feature-wise pretty much the same, you could save a bit of money or get some extra performance.

In both idle and load the card is noisier than it should be, considering its performance class.

Since the card is also about 5% more expensive, the price increase is justified when looking at.

Price-wise AMD is communicating around $150 for their new Radeon HD 6790 which seems to match with what we have seen on some early postings of online merchants.

If AMD can bring down its price by another $10 the situation would dramatically change, making HD 6790 the bread and butter card of the budget oriented gamer.

The clock speeds of the card have also received a healthy bump, up to 900 MHz core and 1100 MHz memory.

Despite increased clock speeds out of the box, the HIS HD 6790 IceQ X Turbo consumes less power than the AMD HD 6790 reference design.

Even though it seems to lack some memory, GTX 460 768 MB can deliver 10% more performance at the same price of $149.

The most important factors here seems to be the lower operating temperature: the same chip at the same clocks, handling the same workload will use more power the hotter it runs.

NVIDIA's GTX 550 Ti works a lot better here when considering clocks, with typical OCs in the range of 1050 MHz.