Radeon HD 7990 And GeForce GTX 690: Bring Out The Big Guns

Features
By Igor Wallossek
published

EVGA recently lent our German lab one of the GeForce GTX 690s we've had in the U.S. for months. The purpose? To pit against HIS' upcoming 7970 X2 and PowerColor's Devil13 HD7990, both dual-Tahiti boards vying to become the world's fastest graphics card.

Temperatures

After seeing the previous page's power figures, we’re bracing ourselves for a lot of heat. How well do EVGA, HIS, and PowerColor deal with hot GPUs, and can they effectively keep them from affecting other components in your case?

All of the graphics cards are at about the same temperature level at idle. Installing them into a chassis only affects them slightly.

As the performance demands increase, EVGA's card becomes increasingly hot, finishing at a toasty 88 degrees cranking on a compute workload in a closed chassis. The company clearly tried to create a compromise between performance, cooling, and noise, allowing its GK104 processors to heat up more in the interest of keeping fan speeds moderate.

PowerCooler's Devil13 HD7990 sports the largest cooler, which really shows in thermal numbers that honestly surprise us, particularly given the power levels on the previous page. HIS' 7970 X2 does well, but it struggles against the Phantom 820. The case's included side fan blows hot air back into the card.

Igor Wallossek
143 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mayankleoboy1
    IMHO, the GTX690 looks best. There is something really alluring about shiny white metallic shine and the fine metal mesh. Along with the fluorescent green branding.
    Maybe i am too much of a retro SF buff :)
    Reply
  • Ironslice
    What's the most impressive is that the GTX 690 was made by nVidia themselves and not an OEM. Very nice and balanced card.
    Reply
  • tacoslave
    i wept
    Reply
  • hellfire24
    your test system is sexy!!!!!!!
    Reply
  • willyroc
    You can't really go wrong either way with these generally insane(so to speak) cards.
    Reply
  • amuffin
    Is it just me or do the 7970X2 and 7990 coolers look so fast and fugly? :heink:
    Reply
  • thanks for the in depth analysis with adaptive V-sync and radeon pro helping with micro stutter.

    not to take away anything for the hard work performed; i would have liked have seen nvidia's latest beta driver, 310.33, included also to see if nvidia is doing anything to improve the performance of their card instead of just adding 3d vision, AO, and sli profiles.
    Reply
  • esrever
    can we get some quadfire benchmarks too? :D
    Reply
  • RazorBurn
    AMD's Dual GPU at 500+ Watts of electricity is out for me.. Too Much Power and Noise..
    Reply
  • mohit9206
    2 670's in sli is better than spending on a 690 and 2 7950's in Xfire is better than spending on a 7990. this way you save nearly $300 both ways
    Reply