Club3D Radeon HD 7990 shortreview

A single Tahiti Radeon HD 7970 3GB GPU consists of 32 compute units and thus a total of 2,048 stream processors and 128 texture units, alongside 32 ROPs. Club 3D's HD 7990 6GB therefore consists of twice as many of each of these, although both of its GPUs are clocked at the reference frequency of 925MHz rather than the 1.05GHz of the HD 7970 3GB GHz Edition.

The two GPUs are each served by six 64-bit memory controllers, which are in turn connected to two 256MB GDDR5 memory modules each, for a grand total of a whopping 6GB of available graphics memory (3GB per GPU). The memory frequency has also been left at the stock HD 7970 3GB setting of 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), giving both GPUs a total memory bandwidth of 264GB/s.

Physically, the length of the custom PCB is 294mm, but the gigantic triple slot cooler extends this measurement to 312mm. With such a large card, it's especially important to ensure that your case can house it, particularly before dropping £700 on it. Weighing in at a massive 1.8KG it's no surprise that Club 3D have included a support column with the card to prevent the PCB from bending over time.

The HD 7990 6GB also sports numerous outputs and supports six-screen Eyefinity, although there's oddly only 5 display outputs. A dual-link DVI and single-link DVI sit alongside two mini DisplayPorts and an HDMI connection on the rear I/O panel. It's here that you'll also find the cards Big Red Button, which when press supposedly overclocks the card's GPUs from 900MHz to 925MHz. This is a fairly pointless and minimal overclock, and in testing we found that the GPUs boosted to 925MHz under load regardless of whether or not the button was pressed in. A CrossFire bridge is provided for anyone crazy enough to want to run two of these monsters together in Quad CrossFireX mode.

The monstrous cooler and its housing are what lend the card its hefty weight. Two copper baseplates (one per GPU) are connected to the aluminium fin stacks by five heatpipes each. This massive clump of metal is cooled by the two side 92mm fans and single 80mm fan in the middle. The black metal enclosure will ensure that much of the card's hot air will find its way out of the rear of your case, but some will still be exhausted back into your case's internals. for complete review see resource

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Radeon HD 7990 And GeForce GTX 690 shortreview

We have PowerColor's Devil13 HD7990 6 GB, along with a GeForce GTX 690 from EVGA, we're about to crown the fastest graphics card of 2012 right here and right now.Our sample was part of a small, limited-production run (we'll come back to this in the conclusion). Only EVGA's offering is sitting on store shelves.

With its factory overclock, PowerColor's Devil13 HD7990 6 GB comes very close to the GeForceGTX 690 in our performance-oriented tests. Meanwhile, HIS' 7970 X2, which was shown off at Computex, but not necessarily a sure thing, is finally ready. Elevated clock rates are supposed to make the HIS card the fastest graphics card, period. But do the benchmarks concur? Let's have a look at how these three boards stack up on paper first.

Radeon HD 7970 X2, Radeon HD 7990, And GeForce GTX 690
	HIS 7970 X2	PowerColor Devil13 HD7990 6 GB	EVGA GeForce GTX 690
Shader Units	2 x 2048	2 x 2048	2 x 1536
GPU Clock Rate	1050 MHz	925 / 1000 MHz	915 MHz +Turbo
ROPs	2 x 32	2 x 32	2 x 32
GPUs	2 x Tahiti XT	2 x Tahiti XT	2 x GK104
Transistors (Billion)	2 x 4.31	2 x 4.31	2 x 3.54
Memory	2 x 3 GB	2 x 3 GB	2 x 2 GB
Memory Bus	2 x 384-bit	2 x 384-bit	2 x 256-bit
Memory Clock Rate	1500 MHz	1375 MHz	1502 MHz

Technically, the HIS card looks like it holds a strong position. If those numbers translate into real-world performance, and if micro-stuttering isn't a problem for AMD, it could be our winner. for complete review see the source

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