14 DAY TRIAL // The rumors of Advanced Micro Devices having chosen April 24, 2013 as the launch day for the Radeon HD 7990 “Malta” graphics card have proven true: the dual-Tahiti adapter is now out.
Setting aside the technical specifications for the moment, there are things that may stir admiration and satisfaction, but there are also factors that could cause disappointment.
The good is that AMD Radeon HD 7990 is shipping with eight free games: Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Crysis 3 Hunter Edition, Bioshock: Infinite, Tomb Raider (2013), Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and Deus Ex: Human Evolution.
It may be enough to make the price of $1,000 / €1,000 seem reasonable, but some may say that if the games are free bundles, they shouldn't factor at all.
Which leads us to the bad: the Malta runs rather poorly in CrossFireX, due to driver issues that always seem to linger.
It rather makes the ability to pair with Radeon HD 7950, HD 7970, and HD 7970 GHz Edition a bit pointless, given the high chance of bugs and stutter.
But that is just half of the problem. The other half is that the card has a price of $1,000 / €1,000, the same as NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690 dual chip, yet still loses to it in six out of eight benchmarks, as far as practical advantages go.
GTX 690 is also shorter, and less heavy on the power consumption, among other things. AMD's card just isn't as well built as its main competitor.
Still, seeing as how last year's HD 7970 X2 cards implied that it would be impossible to make a dual-Tahiti board running both Tahiti chips at full speed (due to power limitations), the adapter is still a pleasant surprise.
Speaking of which, there are two 8-pin PCI Express power connectors delivering energy to the two 28nm GPUs (1 GHz and 2048 Stream processors and 384-bit memory interface per chip) and 6 GB of GDDR5 VRAM (6 GHz).
The GraphicsCore Next architecture also gives the Tahiti chips 128 TMUs (256 in total) and 32 ROPs (64 in total). As for the cooler, it is a dual-slot model with three fans.
The main difference between Malta and the “New Zealand” lies in how the latter needed three power plugs and triple-slot coolers.