Blazing speed, but this card is too
expensive for all but the most extreme gamers
It’s more than a year since the first HD
7000 Series cards appeared, but AMD has at last launched a flagship model -and
what a card it is. The Radeon HD 7990 is a dual-core monster, but it comes in
at the highest price we’ve ever seen for a graphics card.
AMD
Radeon HD 7990
The price can be explained in part by the
card’s use of two Radeon HD 7970 cores, clocked at 1,000MHz, rather than the
normal 925MHz, and also by the 6GB of GDDR5 RAM, which is more than we’ve ever
seen on a graphics card. Between them, the twin cores pack in a massive 8.6
billion transistors and 4,096 stream processors.
The HD 7990 blitzed our benchmarks, easily
beating the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 (web ID: 373696). It scored 80fps in our
1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis benchmark, Lofps ahead of the GTX 680,
and 4x anti-aliasing hardly slowed it down - it scored 75fps. In Battlefield 3,
it zipped through the Ultra quality 1,920 x 1,080 test at 160fps, returning a
score of 116fps when 4x anti-aliasing was activated.
It has enough power to handle gaming across
three screens at a resolution of 5,760 x 1,080. At Very High quality, it ran
Crysis at 52fps and Battlefield 3 at 88fps.
Twin
cores pack in 8.6 billion transistors
AMD has used serious hardware to keep
temperatures down. The bulk of the 306mm-long card is occupied by a huge heat sink,
and it’s topped with three 90mm fans that keep the top temperature of the card
down to an impressively low 72°C. Power consumption is another story, however:
our test rig drew 418W from the mains when stress-tested, and the card requires
two eight-pin power connectors.
The
HD 7990 is the quickest card on the planet, but it isn’t cheap
The HD 7990 is the quickest card on the
planet, but it isn’t cheap. For $256 less, you can get two GTX 680s, a configuration
that will also comfortably play games across three screens. It’s a remarkable
graphics card, but only the wealthiest gamers need apply.
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AMD Radeon
HD 7990 specs
§ 2
x 3GB GDDR5 RAM
§ 950MHz
core clock (boost to 1GHz)\
§ 1500MHz
memory clock (6GHz DDR effective)
§ 2
x 384-bit memory interface
§ 2
x 2048 stream processors
§ 2
x 128 texture units
§ 2
x 32 ROP units
§ PCI-E
interface
§ DirectX
11
§ 1
x DVI, 4 x Mini-DisplayPort
§ 2
x 8-pin PSU connector needed
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