PowerColor Makes Official the Liquid Cooled Radeon HD 6990 LCS

In mid-April, PowerColor has showed the world the first images of its upcoming liquid cooled Radeon HD 6990 LCS graphics card and now the Taiwanese company has officially announced that it started shipping this solution to its distributors.

The PowerColor Radeon HD 6990 LCS combines AMD's flagship video card with a full coverage copper water block that covers the card from end to end.

This was developed by EK Water Blocks and, apart from the two Cayman XT cores, it also cools the memory chips and VRMs.

On the back of the card, PowerColor has added a backplate, which should help dissipate the heat produced by the rear mounted GDDR5 memory, and the stock HD 6990 bracket has also been modified to occupy only one PCIe slot.

Outside of the improved cooling solution, PowerColor's HD 6990 LCS graphics card strictly follows AMD's guidelines as it uses the stock GPU and memory frequencies as well as the reference PCB.

The Radeon HD 6990 is AMD's fastest graphics card to date as it packs two Cayman XT cores on the same PCB and features 3072 stream processors, 192 texturing units, 64 ROP units and a pair of 256-bit wide memory interfaces that are linked to 4GB of GDDR5 video buffer.

Its two cores are clocked at 830MHz, but the card also features a special switch which enables users to run it into the so-called AUSUM mode that overclocks the GPUs to 880MHz.

The PowerColor LCS HD 6990 is shipped together with high-flow 3/8" and 1/2" fittings (barbs) with captured o-rings to prevent leakage.

No details regarding pricing are available at this time, but the regular version of the PowerColor Radeon HD 6990 retails for $709.99 shipped, while the EK-FC6990 waterblock and backplate are priced at about $223 US, so the LCS HD 6990 could surpass the $900 mark.