Let’s start with a task that features a continually-changing load, never reaching 100% or falling below 40%. We begin our video analysis with a round of Crysis 3. You’ll hear the card start whining at the five-second mark.
Since the fans start off quietly and only become audible toward the end of our video, we want to concentrate on the parasitic noise that dominates throughout the recording. The fans aren’t responsible for this card’s noise levels at all. A frequency spectrogram helps us to understand this better. Its color scale represents the individual levels ranging from blue (quiet) and purple (middle) through red (elevated noise levels) to orange and yellow (loud). Green stands for the predetermined upper limit, which is never reached:
The fans only kick into high gear when a compute-heavy app pushes both Tahiti GPUs to full load, filling in the lower end of the frequency spectrum. This makes them seem louder to human ears, as if they were responsible for the overall noise level. A video helps us illustrate once again.
And here’s the spectrogram that goes along with the video. It shows us how the fans easily drown out the whining under full load.
We’ve learned two things. First, as a result of the components generating noise at different frequencies, AMD’s Radeon HD 7990 cannot be accurately measured using a simple sound level meter. Second, AMD partly undermines the hard-earned progress that went into quieting its cooling solution. Although the overall result isn’t bad (we’re certainly much happier with the 7990 than the 6990), the high-pitched whine is noticeable enough to illicit raised eyebrows from observers correctly ascertaining that a graphics card shouldn’t be making those noises.
Reference Under Load: GeForce GTX 690
To give you a point of comparison, we applied the same load to GeForce GTX 690 and recorded its output.
- AMD's Malta Becomes The Radeon HD 7990
- Much-Improved Acoustics, With One Nagging Issue
- Test Setup, An Explanation Of FCAT, And Benchmarks
- Results: 3DMark
- Results: Battlefield 3
- Results: BioShock Infinite
- Results: Borderlands 2
- Results: Crysis 3
- Results: Far Cry 3
- Results: Hitman: Absolution
- Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Results: Tomb Raider
- Radeon HD 7990 Vs. GeForce GTX 690: The Pepsi Challenge
- Noise Measurements And Fan Speed
- Noise Analysis: Frequency Spectrum And Videos
- OpenCL: General-Purpose Computing
- OpenGL: Synthetic Gaming Performance
- Can The World’s Best Bundle Save Radeon HD 7990?


If you're looking to game at 1920x1080, I can save you a ton of money by recommending something less than half as expensive. This card is for folks playing at 2560 *at least.* Next time, I'm looking to get FCAT running on a 7680x1440 array
Thats some nice gains from the prototype driver.
Power is the one thing I didn't have time for. We already know the 7990 is a 375 W card, while GTX 690 is a 300 W card, though. We also know AMD has Zero Core, which is going to shave off power at idle with one GPU shut off. I'm not expecting any surprises on power that those specs and technologies don't already insinuate.
If you're looking to game at 1920x1080, I can save you a ton of money by recommending something less than half as expensive. This card is for folks playing at 2560 *at least.* Next time, I'm looking to get FCAT running on a 7680x1440 array
People mostly buy Intel (I3/i5 a lot more than i7) just because Intel can provide top of the line CPUs in the i7 Extreme range. Same goes here, if some hears that AMD has a better 1000$ card than Nvidia, they will probably spend 100-200$ for an AMD card and not Nvidia.
Power ... unless you`re not a guy who saves 2 years in a row for this card to have a 6 months nerd gaming glory you won`t care that much how power hungry this card is.
Is just like asking Ferrari or Lamborghini how many mpg their cars do.
2. Regarding the fan noise and the hum : It would be interesting to know how much noticable is the fan noise and the hum with increaseing listner distance. IOW, which noise is more noticable at near/medium/far distances ?
Drivers still are AMD's biggest weakness. I would have expected AMD to havetop-notch , A-one drivers to go with the HD7990. After all, this is AMD's halo product. The first impression is what matters. The conclusion is basically "Card is good. Drivers are poor, with better coming in future". So ultimately its selling a promise, which may/may not succeed. It appears to me that AMD doesnt value its own products.
Also, has the Video Conversion Engine in AMD taken off ?
Unfortunately I'm really not sure the whining issue is something that can be fixed with a driver update. I think it has more to do with the hardware on the board than anything else. But it's good to see that AMD has finally recognized the frame time variance and micro-stutter problem, and are actively pursuing a solution. Although the test in the review was limited, I think it's telling that every gamer tested was able to recognize the difference between AMD and Nvidia cards, and even the difference brought by AMD's own prototype drivers.
I know and that's what I meant by hopping that they would have addressed the whining with this card. It happens to all their cards, well the ones that I have owned especially the XFX and if they knew what causes then they should have fixed it.
Let's hope that the prototype driver will also translate to better drivers for all their GPUs and address the frame rate issues. Other than that, it is a good card but I think, for my personal use since I was waiting to see what this can offer, I will just get the GTX 680 or the GTX 780 next month and will definitely go back to AMD if they address those issues.
For everyone seeking power and heat results:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6915/amd-radeon-hd-7990-review-7990-gets-official/16
It consumes a lot of power under load, substantially more than the GTX690, but like Chris said that's to be expected. The big difference with the 7990 seems to be acoustics in relation to temps at load. It's a massive improvement over the 6990, and pretty much on par with the GTX690. Unfortunately the coil whine seems to undo a lot of the improvements made to the stock cooler, but all things considered it's pretty impressive what AMD was able to do in this area, especially in comparison to unofficial solutions from other vendors (dual slot, only requires 2 8-pin).
Sorry, that's a reading fail on my part. Thought you said, 'hope they'll address the whining' or something to that effect.
No problem.