Sapphire Radeon HD 6990 4GB Graphics Card
Andy Ruffell / 14 years ago
A Closer Look
The card is a simple affair as we see when all new AMD cards are released barring it’s length. Coming in at at just over a hefty 1 FOOT in length, you’ll have to make sure your case has ample room to house it. Sapphire have spiced things up a bit with some fancy graphics but no Sapphire self-branding in the form of a logo, but still uses the red and black AMD colours.
The underneath of the card is somewhat different to cards we’ve seen in the past as it’s covered with the usual casing but has two clamp brackets as it’s a dual GPU card.
Even though the length of the card is huge, the bulkiness still remains in the same category of other cards and only takes up two expansion slots in your system.
Power is something this card thrives upon, as you require TWO x 8-pin PCI-Express power adapters which are situated at the top of the card.
So who reading this has over £1000 to blow? Sadly not us, but for those of you wanting more from your system, you could always buy another one of these cards for some EXTREME CrossFire action. You will also see a BIOS switch just next to the CrossFire adapter port. This is known as the AUSUM which stands for Antilles Unlocking Switch for Uber Mode. Congratulations AMD on the worst marketing ploy ever, but what it does enables the user to switch from Position 2 to Position 1 which automagically clocks the core from 830MHz to 880MHz as well as upping the voltage from 1.12V to 1.175V.
On AMD cards that we’ve looked at lately, we’ve seen a bunch of DVI connectors, a HDMI and DisplayPort. It’s become a bit of the norm but with this card we see something a bit different. Instead we see one singular DVI port and FOUR mini DisplayPorts which is where the four different dongles and adapters come into play.