AMD Radeon HD 6990 review

Let’s get this out of the way immediately: the AMD Radeon HD 6990 is the fastest graphics card money can buy. It’s also one of the hottest and loudest cards we’ve ever seen, but if you’ve looked at the price and are genuinely considering a purchase such trivialities won’t concern you. For the rest of us this article will be a purely aspirational dreamland.

As with the last generation’s Radeon HD 5970, this monstrous card slaps two top-end graphics cores onto one long slab of PCB. The two chips, codenamed Antilles, are tweaked versions of the HD 6970’s Cayman XT core. The 880MHz clock has been reduced to 830MHz as standard across both cores, and the 2GB of GDDR5 memory per core (for a total of 4GB) has been slowed from 1,375MHz to 1,250MHz to keep things manageable.

Each core has 1,536 stream processors for a total of 3,072 across the whole card – interestingly enough, that’s 128 less than the HD 5970 – and the HD 6990’s 5.2 billion transistors tops every other graphics card on the market. It’s one serious piece of enthusiast gaming hardware.

We’ll start with the lesser of our gaming benchmarks, if only to prove that they’re rendered largely redundant. In Just Cause 2, an average of 96fps in our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High benchmark, with 8x anti-aliasing, is far beyond the 74fps of Nvidia’s top-end GTX 580. In Stalker: Call of Pripyat, the HD 6990 averaged of 81fps in our maximum quality 1,920 x 1,080 benchmark, comprehensively trouncing the GTX 580’s 49fps.

But it’s Crysis that pushes a card the most, so let’s get to the important figures. First, the HD 6990 achieved an average of 67fps in our Very High quality, 1,920 x 1,080 test, versus 54fps from the GTX 580 and 64fps from the Radeon HD 5970, AMD’s own previous dual-GPU flagship.

That’s not a huge leap over the last generation, so we’ll ramp up the settings: at 2,560 x 1,600 – the resolution of choice for 30in TFTs – with Very High quality settings, the GTX 580 met its match, yet the HD 6990 managed a massive 53fps (see graph).

Enabling 8x anti-aliasing on top of that makes for a very tough test, but seemingly not tough enough: the HD 6990 breezed through with a staggering 44fps.

It’s possible to extract a little more performance from this monstrous card, too, via a tiny switch near the PCI bracket. Flip it, and you’ll change from the standard BIOS to an overclocked version that restores each core’s base clock to 880MHz, upping the maximum theoretical power consumption from 375W to a huge 450W.

While that’s a sizeable boost on paper, it disappointed in the real world. It added just 1fps to the average in that most demanding Crysis test, a measly 2fps to the toughest Just Cause 2 benchmark, and 3fps to our toughest Stalker result. In fact, the only area that saw a meaningful rise was the one we didn’t want: with the standard BIOS our whole test rig drew a peak of 423W, but the overclocked settings upped that to 477W. It requires two eight-pin power cables too.

That begins the caveats, of which there are several. The most obvious is the HD 6990’s sheer size, with its 305mm length proving too much even for our large Cooler Master CM 690 II Advanced test chassis. To fit the card inside, we had to remove its hard disk cage and use the motherboard’s lowest PCI Express x16 slot – and you’ll have to screw it in carefully to make sure the 1.14kg weight is amply supported.

The HD 6990 isn’t overly noisy when idle, but it’s one seriously loud card when the games get going. The single fan ramped up to levels of noise we thought we’d left behind when the GTX 480 was retired. With the boost switch enabled it was louder still.

At least the pair of vapour-chamber coolers kept the GPUs relatively chilled, with the cores peaking at 83°C in normal mode and 84°C when boosted. It’s a little higher than we’d like, but it doesn’t hit truly dangerous heat levels.

And then there’s the biggest issue of all: the astronomical price. Although you could argue it’s launching at a similar price to its predecessor, an expected £560 inc VAT is still a faintly ludicrous amount of money to be spending on a single component in your PC. This record-breaking power will be the preserve of those for whom money really isn’t a consideration, and those lucky people can enjoy the HD 6990’s blistering power on their 30in TFTs with all the settings to maximum. Maybe they’ll let the rest of us come round and watch.

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