Whether it is late to market or not, the board is very powerful

Oct 19, 2012 14:45 GMT  ·  By

AMD does not have a reference Radeon HD 7990 graphics card, which means that OEMs had to invent PCBs and circuits all on their own. Club 3D has just announced the successful completion of such a development process.

So far, we've seen Radeon HD 7990 board released by PowerColor, VTX3D and ASUS. Club 3D's creation is similar to them in many ways.

First off, with two Tahiti XT graphics processors, the adapter has 4096 stream processors, since each GPU has 2048.

Likewise, each GPU has its own memory interface of 384 bits, which, naturally, means double the memory capacity of Radeon HD 7970.

Thus, the Club 3D Radeon HD 7990 Dual GPU adapter has 6144 MB (2 x 3072MB).

The clock frequencies are of 900 MHz for each GPU (925 MHz in boost state) and 5500 MHz for the VRAM.

As for the cooler, it is a three-slot beast with 10 heatpipes and three fans. In idle, the GPU temperature should hover at 45 degrees Celsius, while heavy workloads will take it to 65 degrees.

Buyers should not make the mistake of considering the HD 7990 a god among graphics cards though. Despite double the resources, the overall performance is only 45% faster than the single-GPU Radeon HD 7970. Then again, something along those lines can be said about all multi-chip video cards too.

But we digress. There are a couple more things worth mentioning, one of them being the ZeroCore Power technology (can turn off most functions of the board when unused, lowering TDP from 500W to 30W), the other being the reasonable noise output of 31.5dBA in idle and 33.9dBA under load.

Retailers should list the newcomer soon, for around $899 / 899 Euro. Most customers will be from among power gamers and overclockers, so it is fortunate that the OEM included Dual BIOS (one main BIOS and a backup software).