AMD ’s dualGPU cardshave come a farsighted way in the past several years . The original Radeon HD 3870 was noisy , ran red-hot and did n’t always do up to sniff . Since then , AMD ’s Catalyst Driver suite has well improved the performance and breadth of CrossFire - support games .
On the hardware side , AMD is pulling out all the stops with itsRadeon HD 6990card . The company understands that a dualGPU cardis most appealing to a small band of fancier who really want the card to push the edge of the gasbag , both in term of technology and features .
Despite being fully twelve inches long - like its predecessor , the Radeon HD 5970 - theHD 6990looks a little less impose than the 5970 . Maybe it ’s the center field - ride sports fan , which visually breaks up the vast mass of the cooling shroud .
The Radeon HD 6990 combine twin Cayman GPUs , 4 GB of GDDR5 and a new cool down system .
Still , it ’s a big , heavy card that will only go in expectant microcomputer cases , so make certain your case has the room for it .
The HD 6990 is essentially two Radeon HD 6970 cards built onto one carte . While the base core clock speed is down a mo , at 830MHz , the full 6970 has been replicated , complete with 3,072 entire shader ALUs , 192 texture unit and 4 GB of GDDR5 run at 1,250MHz .
A brace of HD 6970 GPUs and all that GDDR5 , even with the core clocks cranked back to 830MHz , have serious power ; the HD 6990 ship with two 8 - pin PCI Express power connection . Also built into the posting is a tiny physical magnetic dip electrical switch that allow you to overclock and overvolt the core clock with a individual flick , to 880MHz . flip that switching turns the 6990 into full , scream dual HD 6970s , but at a hefty power cost . At full gun , the overclocked HD 5990 used 528W - more power than we ’ve ever see from a single graphics card . The scorecard itself , when overclocked , consumes up to 450W , which call for serious voltage ordinance . AMD touts its use of Volterra digital programmable regulator and cherry - picked GPUs which would run at eminent voltages and clock speed without melt .
The dual Volterra digital regulators are the orthogonal chips at the top . The two GPUs are symmetrically laid out .
cool dual Cayman GPUs and 4 GB of video RAM takes a serious cooling system . AMD re - engineered the cool down system , incorporate a full - board passion wastefulness system with twofold evaporation chambers .
The heat swallow hole fins each enshroud a separate vaporization chamber located above each GPU . The copper head sink is thermally linked via phase alter thermal interface materials .
The central buff pulls heat from the rearmost GPU , labour that atmosphere over the front GPU . Since all the video connectors are mounted on one side of the double - wide PCI angle bracket , the other bracket side becomes a full - height exhaust vent .
The HD 6990 ship with five telecasting connector built in , one dual - nexus DVI connecter and four mini - DisplayPort 1.2 attach point . Retail corner will ship with three extra adapter , one miniDP to single link DVI passive , one miniDP to single link DVI active and a miniDP to HDMI inactive .
Four miniskirt - DP 1.2 port plus a dual liaison DVI connector enable full Eyefinity support .
So the Radeon HD 6990 seems well engineered . How does it actually do ? We cranked up the criterion testbed , loaded up the benchmark and took it for a spin . We compared the HD 6990 ( with the OC switch in both mount ) to an overclocked eVGA GTX 580 SC , and the previous generation Radeon HD 5970 .
Any lingering doubtfulness as to who is the fresh performance champ are now gone . In game that are seem mostly bandwidth or texture spring , we see fiddling remainder between the OC scope and the received setting . It ’s deserving note that we did see games collapse on a couple of occasions when the board ’s switch was set in the OC setting , while the 6990 was completely static at the stock mount .
So for the instant , AMD gets to hoist the PC computer graphic performance crown onto its brow . But renown and GPU fortune can be momentaneous , and already rumblings of a dual GPU Nvidia - based card have hit the Internet rumour mills .
Will you need one ? At $ 699 , the monetary value is pretty steep , especially if you reckon that a individual Radeon HD 6970 costs about $ 360 . Also , it ’s a bragging card , so ensure you case has room for a foundation - farsighted board . And you ’ll need a robust powerfulness supplying to cede all that succus .
Nevertheless , the temptation is there – that ’s a luck of bare-ass GPU force on a single card . The cost of GPU nimbus is never a little one .
$ 699 ( est)http://www.amd.com
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