The Radeon HD 6990 has started
AMD today officially launched its latest Dual-GPU monster, which earned it the title of the world’s fastest video card.
There has been a lot of news recently about AMD’s fastest video card to date, the Radeon HD 6990, but now it’s time for the official launch. Equipped with two graphics processors, the beast uses Cayman chips, which are radically different from previous solutions in terms of architecture. On the structure of Cayman, the HOC in an earlier article detailed information can be found. Thanks to the dual GPU design, the card has 3.072 stream processors, 192 texturing units, and 128 Z sampling units. The GDDR5 memory chips from Hynix's factory operate at around 5 GHz, which are connected to the two Cayman chips via a 2 × 256-bit data bus in a capacity of 2 × 2 GB. The card has two pieces of BIOS that use different clocks for GPUs. The first BIOS includes the default setting that the two graphics processors tick at 830 MHz at a core voltage of 1,12 volts. In this case, the computational power is 5,1 TFLOP. When BIOS # 2 is activated, the two Cayman switches to 880 MHz, resulting in an increase in computing power from 5,1 to 5,4 TFLOP and a voltage of 1,175 volts. The bandwidth of the memory is 320 GB / s in both cases.
Of course, for a monster of this caliber, consumption is also not a negligible factor, as if the product exceeds the 300-watt limit, it can no longer compete in the OEM market. AMD engineers knew this too, so the card features a technology dubbed PowerTune, which came with the Radeon HD 6900 series and what In this article can be read in detail. The point is that with this, the card's power consumption will not be a fixed value, but can be set within wide limits, so the Radeon HD 6990 can also travel in the OEM sphere, as PowerTune is able to reduce the power consumption to 300 Watts. By implication, this thing also works the other way around, meaning consumption can be changed upwards to get a little extra power. The manufacturer has designed the product to work stably even under a load of 450 watts. This will give tuners real pleasure.
Of course, such an awesome amount of heat has to be dissipated somehow. This is ensured by a solution consisting of two heat chambers and a temperature-controlled fan. On the printed circuit board, two 8-pin PCI-E connectors await the corresponding power connectors. On the back is a Dual-Link DVI and four 1.2 Mini-DisplayPorts. The repertoire also includes HD3D support for the presence of the UVD 3 engine. If one is not satisfied with the performance of such a beast, it is possible to connect more in a Crossfire system, although in this case at least a 1000 watt power supply will be required. Of course, the novelty capable of brutal speed is by no means a cheap toy, as the recommended consumer price is not less than 699 US dollars, it can be taken home in Europe for 600 euros.
By the day of the official premiere, several manufacturing partners had completed their own, essentially just redesigned products, as AMD had banned the modification of the reference solution. Affected manufacturers include, for example, Sapphire, PowerColor, Club3D, HIS, MSI and ASUS. It’s also worth noting that on this day, the game Dragon Age II was released courtesy of BioWare, which received a DirectX 11 graphics engine and also supports Eyefinity and HD3D technologies.
Here are some foreign tests about this monster:
