14 DAY TRIAL // Now that the Radeon HD 6990 has become official, AMD's graphics card partners have also started announcing their Antilles-based solutions, and one of the first companies to intro such a product is PowerColor.
Right from the bat, it becomes apparent that PowerColor's solution doesn't differ in any way from AMD's reference HD 6990 design, except for the colorful sticker that was placed on its plastic shroud.
This means that the card uses the same dual vapor chamber setup that can handle up to 450W of heat as well as a couple of programmable Volterra regulators that have been placed right in the middle of the PCB (below the fan) for improved cooling and overclockability.
The card's clocks were also left unaltered as the dual Cayman XT GPUs are clocked at 830MHz while the 4GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1250MHz (5GHZ effective data rate).
The frequency of the graphics card can be further increased via a dual-BIOS switch (standard to all HD 6990 solutions) that raises the core's clocks to 880MHz as well as its vCore from 1.12V to 1.175V.
As we previously reported, the Radeon HD 6990 features 3072 stream processors, 192 texturing units and 64 ROPs as well as dual 256-bit memory buses with a total memory bandwidth of 307.2GB/s.
“The PowerColor HD6990 is ready to tackle all the demanding game titles with dual GPU design,” says Ted Chen, CEO of TUL Corporation.
“All gamers should be excited about the announcement of the fastest graphics solution ever,” concluded the company's rep.
No details regarding prices were provided, but the Radeon HD 6990 has an MSRP of $699.
Nvidia's response to the AMD's dual-GPU monster will be called the GeForce GTX 590 and, according to some rumors, will be launched during the PAX East game conference, which is scheduled to take place between 11 and 13 of March.