Pre-orders available for Radeon RV790 card

In April it will finally be released; ATI's long-anticipated RV790 graphics card. In the past weeks, many controversial reports were made on the specifications of this GPU. Initially, an overclocked version of the RV770 was mentioned, whereas later reports even mention shader unit increases from 800 to 960. There's also been rumors that the chip is already a 40nm one, rather than the conventional 55nm.

A certain fact is that the RV790 will be faster than the RV770, which makes it likely that the chip will be marketed as HD4890 or HD4900 series, bearing a recommended price of approximately $299. The RV790 can already be pre-ordered in multiple online shops, as well as some retailers.

Some of the specifications are already known; the RV790 will have a 256-bits memory interface, linked to GDDR5 memory. The Dutch webshop Salland Automatisering claims that Sapphire's RV790 card has a core clock frequency of 850 MHz and an effective clockspeed of 3900 MHz for the memory. If the RV790 won't have more than 800 shader units, this will make the card 10 to 15% faster than the current HD4870.  

De HD4890 is AMD's latest single-GPU topmodel, image source: PC Online