Unfortunately, it looks like we just got hit with this as an April Fool's gag. Good one, TechPowerUp!
In mid-March, we reported that AMD was expected to release its dual-GPU flagship card the Radeon HD 7990 (codenamed "New Zealand") shortly after Nvidia's Kepler release. Today, we are getting our first glimpse of the HD 7990 reference board and more detailed information on the specifications from a GPU-Z screenshot.
Lets start with the reference board...
You see the card is using a single 70 mm fan, instead of the lateral-flow blower seen with the previous generation Radeon HD 6990, which is explained in our original review of the HD 6990. As many users know, the HD 6990 was plagued with complaints for high noise associated with this design. AMD took a page out of Nvidia's book and utilized the ventilation design seen with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 590. This design puts the axial fan in the middle of the two heatsinks.
Now, lets take a look to see what the GPU-Z screenshot tells us about the HD 7990...
The card is using an AMD-rebadged PLX PEX8747 PCI-Express 3.0 48-lane bridge chip, which features "broadcast" features that makes it fit for dual-GPU graphics cards. The HD 7990 features 1 GHz core clock speed, with 1250 MHz memory (5 GHz effective). The card has a total of 6 GB GDDR5 memory (3 GB per GPU), with 384-bit (x2) memory bus. It features completely-unlocked 28 nm "Tahiti XT" GPUs, with 2048 stream processors. It will support DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.0 and DirectCompute 5.0. Other items that are known about the HD 7990 is that it draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Display outputs include one dual-link DVI and four mini-DisplayPort connectors.
The HD 7990 is slated for a "hard-launch" on April 17, AMD's Radeon HD 7990 6 GB "New Zealand" will target a price-point of US $849.
