According to our sources, AMD has brought the official launch of the Radeon HD 7790 forward and first reviews should be up on Friday, 22nd of March.
The decision for the new official launch date did not change many things as the retail/e-tail availability is still expected in April, but we guess that AMD wanted to have a head start in order to do as much damage possible to Nvidia's GT 650 Ti Boost graphics card. The sample cards should already be in the hands of selected members of the press, according to our sources.
To make things even sillier, Nvidia came up with the GT 650 Ti to counter the AMD Radeon HD 7790, and now AMD is countering that with a preemtive launch. It is a good thing these guys didn't run the US or USSR during the Cold War. We'd all be a layer of fine, irradiated dust right now. [Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap. Ed]
In case you missed it, the Bonaire based Radeon HD 7790 is expected to feature 768 stream processors and a 128-bit memory interface, at least according to early GPU-Z screenshots. It needs a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector, should be available in versions with 1 and 2GB of GDDR5 memory and feature two DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs.
The Radeon HD 7790 aims to fill the gap between the HD 7770 GHz Edition and the Radeon HD 7850 graphics and should be priced accordingly.