Radeon 6990 ?

jcphamer

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Sep 20, 2011
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Hello i installed my saphire radeon 6990 into my system. Going into system properties , i see the card, however its only showing 2 GB? isnt it suppose to show 4 GB?

I also went to MSI afterburner and i only see one GPU temp. However it does show that gpu 1 is the master gpu and gpu 2 is the video controller.

Is that how its suppose to be?

system and games run fine. Im just curious why its not saying 4gb ram and 2 gpu?

im runnig window 7 64 bit with I7 960/ asus sabertooth. and 1000w power supply.
 


physically there is 4GB of RAM installed on the PCB. each GPU got 2GB of RAM.
 

lozz08

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May 24, 2011
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The card uses two GPUs in crossfire on the same board. The total amount of memory available is 2gb, because the two gpus must have the same data in their memory in order to work together. So really you still only have 2gb of memory but double the processing power.
 

NuclearShadow

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Sep 20, 2007
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Yes and no.

Think of it as having a SLI/Crossfire setup because that's what it really is just on one lane. Each GPU on it has 2GB assigned to it.
However due to current limitations on SLI and Crossfire the memory will not be combined. So while the card has 4GB physically present
if you were to say play GTA IV the game will only recognize and utilize up to 2GB.
 

jcphamer

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Sep 20, 2011
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Ok

Then what i dont understand is why they advertised 4gB? I do understand that this is the same gpu as 6970. But what is the real difference when you just buy 2 6970 and crossfire them?
I thought that since the ram is on one board it should utilize and recognize it as 4GB.

I used to own a nvidia GTX590 and when i run the MSI afterburner. It recognize that it has 2 gpu with 3 gb of ram.

Right now My card on the MSI show 1 GPU (master) and the gpu (synchronized) to the master.
Is that normal? or am i suppose to do some type of setting in the Catalyst?

 
It's marketing.Exactly the same way the advertised the 6990 being from the creators of the fastest card in the world.It's always marketing.

Supposidly their's supposed to be much better crossfire scaling if their on the same PCB.Also their would be less heat and less space to worry about.
 
because physically the card have 4GB of RAM installed on it. but in multi gpu setup two card with 2GB memory each will not grant you a total of 4GB. for example if you're the game use 1GB of your GPU RAM it doesn't mean that you will have another 3GB free. most likely the 1st gpu will use 1GB and the second one will also use another 1GB because when you put the card together they did not the share the total available RAM on the setup. in case of 6990 the first 2GB will be dedicated to the 1st gpu and the other 2GB will be dedicated to 2nd gpu. it is the same as GTX590. there are 3GB of RAM installed on board but each gpu core have 1.5GB of RAM dedicated to them. other than that there is no difference between 6990 and 6970 in technical terms. they only different physically. you need 2 discrete card for in normal 6970 CF while 6990 is 6970 CF on one PCB.
 


+1
 

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