Sapphire HD7990 Atomic, new AMD motherboards revealed

Sapphire was at Computex 2013 and although the brand hasn’t been very prominent in recent months, they aim to make some noise with a custom HD7990.

Its called the HD7990 Atomic and it’s part of Sapphire’s range of high-end AMD graphics cards that ship with cater coolers. The Atomic uses a custom circuit board with a 12-phase VRM, 6GB of GDDR5 memory, two over-clocked HD7970 cores and a custom water-cooling block that should work with a lot of custom water-cooling setups.

Like the previous HD7990 cards, it requires three 8-pin PEG power connectors and has a maximum TDP of just over 500W. The card requires a backplate for strength and comes with a radiator and pump that fits into a 5.25-inch DVD drive bay.

: Sapphire HD7990 Atomic

: Sapphire HD7990 Atomic drive bay

The really interesting piece of their exhibit was their AMD motherboards. The firm, which is a close partner with AMD, showed off three motherboards using the company’s APU products. The first one is part of Sapphire’s PGS lineup for business use. It comes with an AMD FirePro A320 APU pre-installed and supports up to 32GB of memory, has eight SATA 6GB/s ports supporting multiple variations of RAID and support for Ultra HD 4K monitors.

The other two were much more interesting and quite an early indication of the direction that AMD’s Kaveri processor family will take. Its called the IPC-FS1r2A75 and it uses socket FS1, a socket first seen with Llano laptops and that currently works with AMD’s R-series processors which have recently been updated with Jaguar architecture.

The interesting bit about the board is the integrated E6000 (GCN-based) GPU, complete with its own GDDR5 memory chips totalling 1GB of memory. Its complemented by the A75 chipset and offer six mini-Displayport outputs, four HDMI ports, two laptop-size memory slots, four mini-PCI-E slots, five SATA 6GB/s ports, two Gigabit ethernet ports and 6-channel audio.

You’re more likely to find this particular board driving a kiosk or a gaming machine inside a casino, but it is interesting that it has the onboard GDDR5 RAM. Its been assumed that AMD would need to integrate GDDR5 memory chips into their motherboard and put Kaveri on a BGA socket to earn money from it, but if boards like these are possible then getting the same power as the PS4 inside your PC will be even easier.

The third, the IPC-FT3GTS, is a ITX board that will run a dual or quad-core Kabini-based G-series chip, AMD HD8000 graphics and a host of connectivity options including HDMI and VGA video ports. Like the other boards here, it supports Eyefinity multi-monitor setups and will work with Ultra HD 4K monitors.