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Official HD6990 Review Thread (*updated* with 21 reviews at this time)

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happy medium said:
Ok what is it then? Tell me what is the limits in watts?

A single 8 pin connector can give over 560 watts on its own, before it starts to melt.
The pci-e slot will only give 75 watts.
Click to expand...

You cant throw 1kw at a GPU and expect it to keep working no matter what. THERE IS A LIMIT maybe not a limit in the PCI spec BUT you cant endlessly toss power at it.
 
mnewsham said:
You cant throw 1kw at a GPU and expect it to keep working no matter what. THERE IS A LIMIT
Click to expand...

Yes there is a limit, and the limit is determined by the cards bios/firmware not the connector. Just like the pci-e slot power is determined by the bios/firmware of your motherboard.
 
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happy medium said:
Yes there is a limit, and the limit is determined by the cards bios not the connector. Just like the pci-e slot power is determined by the bios of you motherboard.
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Yes that's right forget cooling, voltage and everything else it is all limited by the bios riiiigghhhht. 🙄
 
AMD's architecture is better per watt, this is undisputed. If NV wants to beat the 6990 with their 590, they can't artificially cap their TDP to some predefined limit. As we can already see from the reviews, 2x 580s is around 10-15% faster than 1x6990 at 2560 res and around 10% faster at 3 monitor res. 2 x 580s also pull ~200W more than a 6990 [hardocp]. If NV lower the 590 core clocks too much to fit in the 375W "limit", they won't have a chance of matching the 6990. It will be interesting to see their approach.

As for noise, people who buy these cards are the top end of the enthusiast market, they will often water cool their rigs, so reference cooling isn't important as long as its sufficient.

One 6990 is overkill even at 2560 res in most games, including Metro if ppl turn off DoF. Don't even waste time with CF 6990 unless you eyeinfinity, IMO.
 
mnewsham said:
Yes that's right forget cooling, voltage and everything else it is all limited by the bios riiiigghhhht. 🙄
Click to expand...

If you read my prior post I did say cooling also. :thumbsup: Badboy read it.:thumbsup:

This does not change that fact that a card on its own with 2 8 pin connectors can pull 500+ watts and the slot pull 75 watts.
We shall find out soon enough. remember the 6990 pulled 500 watts in the Anand review allready.
 
Silverforce11 said:
If NV lower the 590 core clocks too much to fit in the 375W "limit",
Click to expand...

again there is no 375 watt limit. If there is point me to this link.

If some of Nvidia's board partners release with some good coolers, the party is over for AMD. I doubt you will even see a Nvidia reference card in retail at release, just like the gtx560.
 
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Looking at the TPU review is seems Nvidia is getting better gains with new drivers. The 570 is now faster than the 6970 overall and the 560 is now faster than the 6950 overall. The TPU 560 release review showed the 6970 ahead of the 570 and the 6950 ahead of the 560 in the overall performance summary.
 
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happy medium said:
again there is no 375 watt limit. If there is point me to this link.
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*IF*

Looking at the power draws, 2x 6970 draws ~70W more than 1x 6990. That's power savings at the expense of 1. core clock; 2. memory speed; 3. one less PCB. 2x 580s draw 200W more than 6990 to start with. Which is why i'm leaning towards NV not going to care about some TDP limit and going all out..

However, that's assuming NV was aware of AMD's plan well ahead of time.
 
load81 said:
Looking at the TPU review is seems Nvidia is getting better gains with new drivers. The 570 is now faster than the 6970 at 1900x1200 and the 560 is now even with the 6950 and beats it at lower resolutions. The TPU 560 release review showed the 6970 ahead of the 570 and the 6950 ahead of the 560 in the performance summary.
Click to expand...

And Apoppin at Alienbabletech confirmed that sli/x-fire performance is now neck and neck with the latest drivers from both camps.

It's gonna be a good fight but...........
 
To summarize:

1) The AUSUM switch is useless since it voids the warranty and provides very little performance benefit.

2) This card is the top contender for the loudest reference design videocard ever made, next to the FX5800Ultra (the dustbuster). To exacerbate the problem, while the card is loud, it isn't cool either.

3) Performance is not any better than a pair of 950mhz GTX560 Tis in SLI or a pair of HD6950s in CF. The thing is though, either of those setups cost almost $200 less. This isn't even taking into account that a 6950 can be unlocked into a 6970...Finally, you can almost purchase 3x HD6950s for $750, which I am pretty sure will be a better setup for those using multiple monitors (which is what this card targets anyway).

4) Exceeding PCIe specs may "encourage" AMD and NV to create even more power hungry cards. This is somewhat counterintuitive to the current strategy of focusing on improving performance/watt. I personally do not care that much for power consumption, but this new direction is completely against what AMD has been trying to achieve in the last 2-3 years. Seems somewhat odd to me.
 
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Too hot and too loud. You'd think after seeing the nV 470/480s, they would know better. I guess most people in this $$ bracket would Watercool, but still, those temp and noise ratings are ridiculous. They need to bring those new coolers down to the 6950/70s as well, cause they run too loud, IMO.
 
Russian:

#1. So is bios modding. It's just a feature for crazy ppl to use.

#2. Wouldn't bother without water cooling, it's absurd they even attempted to cool 450W with the traditional blower setup.

#3. 6950s are a bargain, you can't even compare them fairly to 6970s or 580s since their perf/$$ is just so good. This is a repeat of the 5850s vs 5870s vs CF 5850s vs 5970s. Except now the 6990s are performing a lot closer to CF 6970 rather than to CF 6950s. Essentially its epeen/halo premium.

#4. Agreed. We should be heading the other way, going lower with TDP usage rather than higher. This is not progress.
 
I dont understand why we make a big deal about the price for performance being more expensive then X-fire or SLI, it is ALWAYS like this, but apparently we can swallow the pill if the card ISNT top dog? GTX 460's match up with the GTX 580 but cost only $320, x-fire 6970's beat a SINGLE HD 6990 and cost 650 or so compared to 700... so what? That is normal.... maybe im the only one looking at it like that.
 
Not impressed at all. Way too loud/hot/pricey for what it delivers.

Just skimmed through the anandtech review and since anand added various SLI and CF cards it looks even worse than on other sites. 😛
 
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Extremely disappointed after reading several of the reviews.

I can't believe the AMD 6990 performs on par or at times, even below, the GTX-570 in SLI!

The GTX-580 SLI trounces the 6990 in almost all tests even at ultra-high resolutions (5760x1080px) as tested by Hardware Heaven.

To think I waited for almost 4 months for the release of this dual-GPU card seems pointless in retrospect. :\

Now, the waiting game for the GTX-590 starts. I hope NVidia will at least confirm the card soon.
 
Baasha said:
Extremely disappointed after reading several of the reviews.

I can't believe the AMD 6990 performs on par or at times, even below, the GTX-570 in SLI!

The GTX-580 SLI trounces the 6990 in almost all tests even at ultra-high resolutions (5760x1080px) as tested by Hardware Heaven.

To think I waited for almost 4 months for the release of this dual-GPU card seems pointless in retrospect. :\

Now, the waiting game for the GTX-590 starts. I hope NVidia will at least confirm the card soon.
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Minus the DEMOs which are not optimized and where there are FPS in excess of 100, i don't see your point. 6990 and SLI 580s according to that review are very close at 5760 res. AvP, Bulletstorm, DA2, Civ 5 and F1 are the only games where the bench matters, the others are game demos. F1 bugged out for AMD, similar to DA2 bugged out for NV. HardOCP has 6990 faster than sli 580 in F1. It's sucking 200W less than 2x 580s, if that matters to you. IMO, it's a good card for what it is, a halo product, the only thing thats a drawback is the noise.
 
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Paper Launch?

Ouch... 580 needs to come down in price.

Great review Anandtech
 
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