14 DAY TRIAL // It certainly took Gigabyte a while to announce its solutions based on AMD's recently released Radeon HD 6990 graphics card, but the GV-R699D5-4GD-B has been finally made official by the Taiwanese company.
However, the excitement of the release won't be that long lived as the card is basically identical to all the other Radeon HD 6990 solutions that made their way to the market until now, as the only thing that separates Gigabyte's creation from those of its competitors is the custom sticker placed on the card's plastic shroud.
If we were to remove it, we would find two Cayman XT cores that are clocked at 830MHz as well as 4GB of memory GDDR5 which operates at 1,250MHz (5GHz effective).
The video buffer is connected to the GPUs via two independent 256-bit memory buses and the card features 3072 stream processors, 192 texturing units and 64 ROPs.
Just as all the other Radeon HD 6990 solutions available out there, Gigabyte's creation comes with a dual-BIOS switch that overclocks the two Cayman XT GPUs in order for them to work at 880MHz.
Functioning in this mode, the card has a TDP of 450W, and, as a result, AMD had to design the HD 6990 so that it could cope with the increased amount of heat.
The company's solution to that problem relies on the use of dual vapor chambers, one for each GPU, that are cooled by a central blower fan.
While this design manages to dissipate all the heat produced by the two GPUs at full-load, it has a few drawbacks, and one of the most important is that half of the heat generated by the HD 6990 while running is expelled back into the systems case.
The Gigabyte GV-R699D5-4GD-B will be available soon in retail and Newegg has it listed for $739.99 ($40 over AMD's recommended price).