14 DAY TRIAL // Since Sapphire is one of the best-known AMD partners out there, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that they were among the first to reveal their own HD 6990 version, that, however, is not exactly very far from the reference model, at least at a first sight.
So, at a first sight, the Sapphire HD 6990 (apparently, the company wasn't quite keen on keeping around the Radeon name) is somewhat of a “carbon copy” of the AMD Radeon HD 6690, sporting 4GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1250MHz, a dual BIOS system, as well as all of the other advanced technologies we've mentioned in our initial article related to AMD's new card.
And we'll also have to mention an interesting detail here, which we haven't really managed to tackle within our initial article, namely the fact that the power envelope of the new dual-GPU graphics card is quite a decent one, reaching a maximum of 375W in Performance mode or 450W in Extreme mode (in fact, for the latter mode, dual 8-pin PCI Express power connectors are required, along with a suitable PSU).
It's also interesting to mention that Sapphire's implementation of the AMD Radeon HD 6990 comes packed with plenty of connectivity options and adapters, meant to fully unleash the card's potential, provided by the EyeFinity or CrossFire technologies.
So, the sales package also includes a CrossFire Bridge Interconnect Cable, accompanied by a DVI to VGA Adapter, as well as several mini-Display Port adapters (mini-DP to DP, to HDMI, to SL-DVI Passive and Active dongles, to be perfectly accurate).
Last, but certainly not least, it's important to point out that, while Sapphire's not provided an exact price point for its new Radeon dual-GPU graphics card, the fact that it's actually quite close, in terms of design and performance, to the reference version, leads us to believe that the same will apply for the pricing as well, which means that the official price tag should be around 700 US dollars or so, give or take a few bucks.