AMD this week has announced what it is calling “the fastest graphics card in the world”, the Radeon HD 6990. This is a dual GPU offering, and essentially crams two HD 6970 graphics processors onto a single card.
Dual GPUs
The card boasts 182 texture units and 3072 stream processors, and comes with a default 4GB of GDDR5 RAM. One of the more interesting features is the hardware overclock switch on the card. As illustrated in the diagram below, users can flip a switch effectively swapping BIOSes. The default BIOS has the card running at 830MHz with the core voltage stable at 1.12V. Flipping to the “hardware overdrive” BIOS option automatically increases the voltage to 1.175V and bumps the core clock speed up to 880MHz.
Dual BIOS for automatic hardware overclocking
The HD 6990 is a beastly piece of hardware, and therefore requires some decent onboard cooling. It will come standard with dual vapour champers enclosed in a plastic shroud. This will theoretically keep the card running relatively cool and quiet.
Dual vapour chamber cooling system
It is being billed as the ultimate high-end Eyfinity card due to the massive performance on offer, and comes standard with four miniDP ports and one DL-DVI port. It will also ship with 3 adapters: miniDP to SL-DVI Passive, mini DP to SL-DVI Active, and miniDP to HDMI Passive.
AMD claims that the HD 6990 runs games on average 67% faster than the GTX 580 when in the overclocked BIOS profile. This is a tall order, and it will be interesting to see if the card can deliver on these claims. We are getting an HD 6990 in later, and will be able to confirm whether or not the card can deliver on this claim.
The HD 6990 has been given a US recommended retail price of $699 (R4800), and a UK price of £550 (R6150). AMD’s local head office has been able to confirm a local recommended retail price of R7,299, but we can expect different manufacturers to price the card on either side of this figure.
South Africa’s AMD 6990 shipment departed from Europe last week Friday, and is scheduled to clear local customs this Friday. This means that we can expect to start seeing the card at retail from Monday onwards.
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