14 DAY TRIAL // Right after the Radeon HD 6990 has been made official, all of AMD's board partners have started to announce solutions based on the new graphics card, including MSI, that has just unveiled the Radeon R6990-4PD4GD5.
Just like all the other Antilles solutions that made it out until now, this too is based on AMD's reference design and it looks nearly identical with all the other HD 6990 solutions, except for the MSI sticker placed by the company on the card's plastic shroud.
If we were to remove it and take a look at the insides of the R6990, we would see the same dual vapor chamber cooling system that is common to all HD 6990 solutions as well as a pair of programmable Volterra regulator chips.
According to AMD, these can supply the graphcis card with as much as 450W of power, while the beefy cooling system is more than capable of dissipating all the heat produced while in operation.
This is possible thanks to the new cooling design that places the blower fan in the middle of the card and effectively splits the PCB into two separate areas, so that the second GPU won't have to be cooled with the already hot air used for chilling the first graphics core.
In addition to the AMD reference design, MSI's R6990 also follows to the letter the company's specifications regarding the clocks of the card as the GPU is run at 830MHz while the 4GB of GDDR5 memory are run at 1,250MHz (5GHz effective).
Just like all the other HD 6990-based solutions, MSI's card also features a dual-BIOS switch that allows for a special overclocking mode to be selected in which the GPU's core together with the voltage are increased to deliver better performance (the core reaches 880MHz).
The Radeon HD 6990 features 3072 stream processors, 192 texturing units and 64 ROPs as well as dual 256-bit memory buses which deliver a total memory bandwidth of 307.2GB/s.