The Radeon HD 6790 was a mid-range graphics card by AMD, launched on April 4th, 2011. Built on the 40 nm process, and based on the Barts graphics processor, in its Barts LE variant, the card supports DirectX 11.2. The Barts graphics processor is an average sized chip with a die area of 255 mm² and 1,700 million transistors. Unlike the fully unlocked Radeon HD 6870, which uses the same GPU but has all 1120 shaders enabled, AMD has disabled some shading units on the Radeon HD 6790 to reach the product's target shader count. It features 800 shading units, 40 texture mapping units, and 16 ROPs. AMD has paired 1,024 MB GDDR5 memory with the Radeon HD 6790, which are connected using a 256-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 840 MHz, memory is running at 1050 MHz (4.2 Gbps effective).
Being a dual-slot card, the AMD Radeon HD 6790 draws power from 2x 6-pin power connectors, with power draw rated at 150 W maximum. Display outputs include: 2x DVI, 1x HDMI 1.3a, 1x DisplayPort 1.1. Radeon HD 6790 is connected to the rest of the system using a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 interface. The card measures 198 mm in length, and features a dual-slot cooling solution. Its price at launch was 149 US Dollars.