14 DAY TRIAL // Trying to buy a Radeon HD 6990 dual-GPU graphics card in the last couple of months has been an exercise in frustration as no matter what brand one would choose, such solutions were impossible to track down, but AMD will soon correct this situation and bring more HD 6990's in retail.
This low availability is partly due to the high demand for Radeon HD 6970 graphics card, which has left AMD without any Cayman XT cores to be used in the HD 6990.
According to information received straight from AMD, by the ATI-Forum website, the Sunnyvale-based chip maker has now updated its production and expects to correct this situation in the next couple of weeks.
The HD 6990 is AMD's fastest graphics card to date and it was introduced at the beginning of March, with availability starting the same day as the official announcement.
The card itself packs together two Cayman XT cores on the same PCB and features 3072 stream processors, 192 texturing units, 64 ROPs and dual 256-bit wide memory buses connected to 4GB of GDDR5 memory.
The cores are clocked at 830MHz, but the card also features a special switch that enables users to run it into the so-called AUSUM mode that overclocks the GPUs to 880MHz.
This raises the 375W TDP of the HD 6990 to about 450W, so AMD had to use an impressive cooling system in order to keep the temperatures of the card in check.
This comprises two vapor chambers, one for each GPU, that are cooled by a central blower fan. Power is provided via a couple of programmable Volterra regulators that have been placed right in the middle of the PCB.
When it was originally introduced back in March, the AMD Radeon HD 6990 had a recommended price tag of $699.