The HD 6990 is the ultimate enthusiast card from the HD 6000 series. In fact, as this is written it is still AMD’s fastest video card because the HD 7990 is still awaiting an official release from AMD. What struck many people about the HD 6990 was that AMD did a marvellous job managing to get two fully-fledged HD 6970 GPUs onto a single PCB. Yet the reference HD 6990 is plagued by two major design issues, high noise and high heat.
If you’ve ever used a HD 6990, or own a HD 6990, then you’ll know I’m not telling any lies when I say these things are super loud. In fact until this product from Arctic Cooling arrived, I actually avoided using the HD 6990 altogether to protect my ears from a bashing.
Heat is the other major problem as already mentioned. Sitting in a room with a HD 6990 in a system is like sitting in a room with an electric heater on 24/7 and this is made worse by the fact the AMD reference design tends to blow all the heat in just 2 directions, left out the back of the case or right into the case. Arctic’s Accelero Twin Turbo 6990 doesn’t promise to reduce the heat output of your HD 6990 – because it can’t – but what it does promise to do is spare your ears and keep the GPU running at much cooler temperatures.
The Accelero Twin Turbo 6990 is a mammoth cooler for a mammoth graphics card and just from looking at the box we know we are in for a treat with this VGA cooler. I’ve never been so excited about the prospect of being able to use a HD 6990 without the need for ear muffs, with a TDP of 375W I never thought I’d see anything other than water cooling tame this beast – but Arctic look set to prove me wrong.
Pushing the absolute limits of air cooling this Accelero Twin Turbo 6990 features dual 120mm fans and 86 aluminium heat fins plus 5 copper heat pipes per GPU. Yet the fans have a maximum RPM of 1500 so you know straight away the noise is going to be a vast improvement over the stock cooler.
As always, lets have a brief overview of the specifications before we proceed with the product review:
lol just shut up xD.
Thanks for the detailed test. Though it looks a bit strange that with the stock cooler the voltage regulators get about 10% hotter under Furmark and with the Twin Turbo supposingly the temperature increases more than a 100%. Guys look into that again, I would bet on a simple typo.
not a typo. Tried remounting it too, no difference :/ I can assure you its legit
My VRs are despite a little overclocking never higher than 70°C. If you worry, then just push the fan from automatic control which keeps it really low to about 50% PWM. It is still virtually silent.
Claude, no need to get nervous because of this test. I got the following results and I’m a using the card every day a few hours for many months with the Twin Turbo already.
Accelero Twin Turbo 6990, Furmark: GPU 1: 55°C, GPU 2: 52°C, Vreg: 73°C
Stock Cooler, Furmark: GPU 1: 81°C, GPU 2: 77°C, Vreg: 72°C
I have no idea what was measured in this review.
Well, I’m using the AMD 6990 since a long time already. Of course the first thing I had to do is to get rid of this extremely loud reference cooler – and I can recommend it to everybody.
I don’t know how this test was conducted and at which fan speeds. It is not logic that the VR extrusion heatsink looses all the sudden massiv efficiency under Furmark which draws about 30% more power and thus the temperature should go about 30% up. But eteknix wants to tell us that under Furmark the temperature rises more than 100% – funny. No offence but something went wrong on your side.
We are currently looking into the issue. From the numbers i see below in the comments (70-85) I can see that our temperatures from Furmark are about 20 degrees higher than they should be.I will go for one last remount and refit of the card and then have another look. If issues persist I’ll use a different diagnostic program. The review will be updated accordingly.
Thanks Ryan. No offense here. Just share my own opinion. And I am wonderting why there is such a big difference between these two reviews?
We had some issues with our diagnostic program, clearly wasn’t functioning normally with the dual GPU card and all the associated temperature sensors that come with that, I think it was listing the wrong readouts as VRM but its all been retested, double checked and we think everything is okay now.
Yes I have to agree, the results look quite unbelievable. Have bought my card after I have seen the test on overclockersclub.
Those overclocking results were achieved at only 29% fan speed!
I did not bother to overclock on my card and just enjoy the silence. There is no VR cooling issue, at least not on my card.
http://forums.overclockersclub.com/index.php?showtopic=192144
Here are the results:
Overclocked speed – 940 MHz Core, 1400 Ram
Stock cooler:
Idle temp: N/A
Load temp: N/A
Fan speed at load: N/A
*Note the card ran so hot at idle, overclocking it was impossible*
Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo 6990 Cooler:
Idle temp: GPU1 – 46 , GPU2 – 32 , VREG – 52
Load temp: GPU1 – 65 , GPU2- 58 , VREG – 82
Fan speed at load: 29%
I don’t know why everybody keeps talking about the voltage regulators and Ryan for sure something went wrong on your side. I got the cooler 4 months ago and I’m super happy with it. Because of all the fuss I’m reading and this nice but little bit blurry review, I took the time and quickly ran a Furmark myself:
Vreg temp: 75°C
So no reason to worry since these chips are made for 120°C operation temp.
I will continue happily gaming in silence.
Thanks for your sharing, Jeff. That seem reasonable. I do not know why you will get these totally different testing result. But I still believe that this cooler is designer for overclocking, it is impossible to perform worse than the stock cooler. Anyway, thanks both of you.