AMD Radeon 6990 4GB Graphics Card Review

Many graphics cards have been released from the likes of AMD and Nvidia as of late including some lower end models showcasing the potential of low powered DirectX 11 cards and on the other hand we've seen some of the power hungry dual GPU monsters and today gives us a look at another one. You may remember the review we did on the 6990 from Sapphire which uses a reference design much like this. Due to each individual card presenting different results, we thought that it would be wise to show you a second look at a 6990 to see how this compares in terms of benchmarking and overclocking.Specifications[HR][/HR] A Closer Look Today as we're looking at a reference card, we see a distinct reference design that we've seen on other cards in the 6900 series, but with a slightly different layout. We mainly seeing the fan take a move from the end of the card to the middle to distribute the best airflow to the two GPU cores. The likes of some Nvidia cards have seen a triple cooler design to offer the best thermal performance, but even a power house of a card like the 6990 still only sees a dual slot design, showing that AMD still know what they're doing in terms of cooling and efficiency. The card uses a standard PCI-Express 2.1 x16 interface to make connection with your motherboard. As expected, you see two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors to aid in powering this beast of a card and thankfully AMD have thought ahead with the design by placing the connectors on the top of the card as opposed to the end. This is all down to the length of the card as some users may have issues installing it into their cases, and having the connectors on the end would just add to their problems. AMD's marketing department really thought this card through and assumed that a lot of users will not only want two physical GPU cores working hard at powering games, but may even want four and have therefore given this card its very own CrossFire connector to enable you to install a secondary 6990 graphics card for some epic awesomeness. Speaking of awesomeness, AMD have their very own awesome switch. Technically it's the AUSUM but it sounds the same if you say it when drunk and hopping on one foot. It stands for Antillies Unlocking Switch for Uber Mode. Oh dear AMD, oh dear! In short it gives a turbo mode in essence by upping the core clocks of the GPU's from the stock 830MHz to 880MHz whilst also raising the voltage for some extreme overclocking. Connections are plentiful but are all very much the same, but there is method in the madness. We see a standard DVI connector as well as four mini DisplayPort connectors, which once used in conjunction with the various dongles on sale (Sapphire make some good ones) you will be able to output into your preferred connection. An Even Closer LookAs said earlier, the cooler on the card features a central fan design to give maximum airflow across the two GPUs that the 6990 incorporates. The design of fan has been seen on the rest of the 6900 series and is an efficient way of keeping the card cool. The underside of the cooler shows the two copper plates that make contact with the GPUs and many thermal pads can be seen that aid in cooling the memory chips on the card. The back-plate has two clamp bracket spaces and many screw points to enable a perfect fit to the card, thus giving the best cooling available. It also has a few thermal pads to cover the memory chips that are on the rear of the card. The bare card shows a view of the two GPUs as well as the controller chip in the middle which connects the two GPUs together to output as one monster of a card. The rear of the card without its casing shows a brown PCB design and exposes some of the memory chips as this card does include a whopping 4GB of GDDR5 memory. The PCI-Express controller chip still brands the ATI name and acts as a bridge for the card to harness the power of the multiple GPUs through the PCI-Express 2.1 x16 interface and is the same chip seen on the 5970 graphics card. The memory chips are manufactured by Hynix and include the following codes; H5G02H24MFAT2C. These memory chips run at 1250MHz (5000MHz) to give the best possible performance but can also be overclocked if you so wish. The GPUs feature the AMD logo and is part of the Cayman set of cores which is built on a 40nm process and uses around 2.64 billion transistors. Test SetupWith all of our graphics card tests, we use a number of benchmarking utilities and programs to squeeze out every last frame possible from the card whilst placing it under immense pressure. We do this in our separate testing rig as detailed below which supports AMD and Nvidia cards to give the fairest tests possible.Test SystemProcessor (CPU)AMD Phenom II X6 1100TMotherboardAsus Crosshair IV FormulaMemory (RAM)4GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1800MHz Graphics CardHIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X TurboHeatsink (HSF)CoolerMaster Hyper 212+Primary Hard Drive2 x Kingston V+ Series 64GB SSD (RAID 0)Power SupplyBFG EX Series 1200 Watt Modular Power SupplyChassisCoolerMaster Lab Test BenchOperating SystemWindows 7 Professional Edition 64-bitThe tools that we use for benchmarking graphics cards include:3DMark 11Unigine Heaven 2.1Batman: Arkham AsylumDirt 2Just Cause 2Mafia IIMetro 2033 We also use other tools to monitor certain aspects of the graphics card, this includes:CPUID HWMonitorDigital MultiMeterMSI AfterburnerGPU-Z 3dMark 113DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. Unigine Heaven 2.1Heaven 2.1 is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items. Batman: Arkham AsylumBatman: Arkham Asylum is an action-adventure stealth game that uses the Unreal Engine 3. It relies heavily on nVidia's PhsyX engine to give improved physics throughout if available. and uses lots of textures and polygons to build the characters and environments seen in the game. Dirt 2The physics engine from within Dirt 2 is a good test of a card and it's rendering capabilities with fine details such as dust trailing from the rear of the car. There is also the aspect of light and reflections from the cars bodywork and the ability to work with the in game physics and damage rendering engines to produce a realistic gaming experience. Just Cause 2Just Cause 2 is an open world action-adventure video game that was released at the beginning of 2010. The game uses the Avalanche Engine 2.0 and runs on DirectX 10. Several graphics effects and features are used to give a thorough workout to new and even older graphics cards. Mafia IIMafia II is an older game and therefore it does have older graphics engines, however this is is still a good all-round in game benchmark that combines the terrain and explosion rendering of Crysis with the dust and dirt particle rendering test of Dirt 2. It also takes into account the changing light conditions albeit not in quite the same detail as the others, but none-the-less still proves a cards capabilities on slightly older games. Metro 2033Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market. OverclockingThe 6990 features the awesome switch or AUSUM if you want to be technical and increase the cards speed to a pre-defined overclock but we are looking for a bit more.The card runs at a stock 830MHz and 1250MHz for the memory. The AUSUM switch pushes this to 880MHz and keeps the memory at 1250MHz To find the maximum overclock, we used MSI Afterburner to increase the clock speeds by 10MHz at a time, whilst relying on GPU-Z for clarification of the speeds and Furmark to test stability.The results that we obtain can only be used as a guideline as to what this range of cards can do. Obviously every card has a different core among other vital parts, and therefore each card will give slightly varied results. The overclocks we obtained were fully stable at 910MHz GPU clock and 1540MHz memory clock, which from the stock 830MHz is quite a nice increase, though our original Sapphire card managed a 960MHz on the GPU clock. We were able to push the memory on this card a bit further than the Sapphire card that we looked at a few weeks ago.Be warned though, as we overclocked this card, the power draw increased, thus more heat was generated and the fan really did sound like it was ready for an inflight battle.Final Thoughts The main aspect of this review was to show how each individual card performs in terms of benchmarks, games and real-world overclocking as well as giving a more indepth look at the card in way of a video.After we looked at the Sapphire version of this card, a lot of users were interested in how noisy the 6990 can be and what it's true performance is like first hand, to which we hope we've answered any questions and queries on that with this review.Reference cards aren't normally that widely available for the general consumer but can be found if shopped around for and are typically labeled by the retailer as a "value" model but with the Radeon 6990 there is no value about it as it's one expensive monster of a card.Sadly the card uses the same fan as the 6970 (albeit in a different location) meaning that once it gets going it sounds like it's about to take off. Taking this into consideration if overclocking, it may put you off slightly and leave you to be running it at stock unless you get a custom cooling design or even plump for watercooling. For the average user however, you won't want to be stripping your £500 dual GPU graphics card to have a bit of fun as it will likely void your warranty and leave you out of pocket incase anything goes wrong. Overall it's a big decision to make and an expensive one at that leaving you the choice of having amazing looking graphics in games but having a PC that sounds like a jet fighter plane. The decision is in your hands.Pros:Fastest AMD graphics card in the worldAstounding benchmark resultsDual BIOSFull DX11 supportSupport for EyefinityOverclocking headroomCons:NoisyExpensiveVery lengthy cardMassive power drawCan get very hotWe would like to thank AMD for supplying this sampleYou can purchase this item from Scan Attached files 0.jpg (69.3 KB) 1.jpg (51.9 KB) 2.jpg (49.7 KB) 3.jpg (54.6 KB) 4.jpg (50.8 KB) 5.jpg (51.3 KB) 6.jpg (48.6 KB) 6990.jpg (23.4 KB) 6990ref_01.jpg (54.7 KB) 6990ref_03.jpg (92.9 KB) 6990ref_04.jpg (56.9 KB) 6990ref_05.jpg (66.9 KB) 6990ref_06.jpg (81 KB) 6990ref_07.jpg (97.2 KB) 6990ref_08.jpg (61.5 KB) 6990ref_09.jpg (45.6 KB) 6990ref_10.jpg (60.7 KB) 6990ref_11.jpg (45 KB) 6990ref_12.jpg (49.5 KB) 6990ref_13.jpg (41.5 KB) 6990ref_14.jpg (44.2 KB) 6990ref_15.jpg (59.6 KB) 6990ref_16.jpg (47.3 KB) 6990ref_17.jpg (54.4 KB) 7.jpg (52.2 KB) gold.jpg (14 KB) oc.jpg (90.6 KB) stock.jpg (90.6 KB)