AMD Radeon HD 6990 4 GB Review: Antilles Makes (Too Much) Noise
Several months late and supposedly only a couple of weeks ahead of Nvidia's own dual-GPU flagship launch, AMD's Radeon HD 6990 has no trouble establishing performance superiority. But does speed at any cost sacrifice too much of the user experience?
Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11 (DX11)
3DMark 11 is good news for AMD’s flagship. Not only would Radeon HD 5970 have remained the fastest card in the world were it not for the 6990, but the Radeon HD 6990 adds an impressive burst of speed to what we were already seeing.
The performance BIOS demonstrates an appreciable benefit over the default shipping firmware. We’re not sure the gain is worth voiding your warranty over, but if you were planning to overclock anyway, AMD’s more aggressive settings help achieve better scores with the simple flip of a switch. Nice.
Clearly, Nvidia needs to answer back. Its flagship GeForce GTX 580 falls into a distant third place. And while we imagine the company has a thermal challenge in front of it, providing it's looking to cram two GF110s onto a single PCB, we’re looking forward to evaluating the result of its efforts.
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CrazeEAdrian Great job AMD. You need to expect noise and heat when dealing with a card that beasts out that kind of performance, it's part of the territory.Reply -
jprahman This thing is a monster, 375W TDP, 4GB of VRAM! Some people don't even have 4GB of regular RAM in their systems, let alone on their video card.Reply -
one-shot Did I miss the load power draw? I just noticed the idle and noise ratings. It would be informative to see the power draw of Crossfire 6990s and overclocked i7. I see the graph, but a chart with CPU only and GPU only followed by a combination of both would be nice to see.Reply -
anacandor For the people that actually buy this card, i'm sure they'll be able to afford an aftermarket cooler for this thing once they come out...Reply -
cangelini one-shotDid I miss the load power draw? I just noticed the idle and noise ratings. It would be informative to see the power draw of Crossfire 6990s and overclocked i7. I see the graph, but a chart with CPU only and GPU only followed by a combination of both would be nice to see.Reply
We don't have two cards here to test, unfortunately. The logged load results for a single card are on the same page, though! -
bombat1994 things we need to see are this thing water cooled.Reply
and tested at 7680 x 1600
that will see just how well it does.
That thing is an absolute monster of a card.
They really should have made it 32nm. then the power draw would have fallen below 300w and the thing would be cooler.
STILL NICE WORK AMD -
Bigmac80 Pretty fast i wonder if this will be cheaper then 2 GTX 570's or 2 6950's?Reply
But omg this thing is freakin loud. What's the point of having a quite system now with Noctua fans :(