Date:
Monday , March 21, 2011
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD Radeon HD 6990 Video Card Follow-Up Review

We further examine the performance of the AMD Radeon HD 6990 video card. This time comparing it to a GeForce GTX 580 and Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX on a single display. We will also look at the performance advantages of the overclock BIOS option and examine overclocking in both modes.

Introduction

On March 7th, 2011 AMD launched the AMD Radeon HD 6990 "Antilles" video card. This video card is basically two Radeon HD 6970 GPUs engineered onto one printed circuit board (PCB) to provide the fastest possible single-video card performance available. We evaluated this video card and published all the specifications here. Please read that evaluation first, before you read this one, as this is a follow-up evaluation further exploring the performance of the Radeon HD 6990.

In our launch evaluation we evaluated the Radeon HD 6990 in a 3-way Eyefinity display configuration and found an enjoyable gameplay experience at 5760x1200. The performance was similar to two Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX video cards, but did demand a higher price for the connivance of this all-in-one packaged video card. There were some performance comparison we did not have time to fully cover in our launch evaluation that we want to look at now. This evaluation is going to be examining three different performance topics about the Radeon HD 6990. Each page is going to represent a performance topic. The breakdown of this article is such:

Page 3 - We are going to take the Radeon HD 6990 at the out-of-box performance setting and compare it to a single GeForce GTX 580 and single Radeon HD 6970. Since the GeForce GTX 580 cannot run multiple-displays in a single video card configuration we are going to run these tests on our single 30" display at 2560x1600. On this page we want to see how much faster the Radeon HD 6990 is compared to the GeForce GTX 580 since both "single" video cards and represent the fastest single video card performance from both AMD and NVIDIA currently. We have also included the Radeon HD 6970 in these tests so we can see how well the Radeon HD 6990 is scaling up from a single Radeon HD 6970. All of these tests are apples-to-apples settings.

Page 4 - On this page we are going to examine the special performance overclock mode on the Radeon HD 6990 as delivered via the BIOS switch atop the video card. The BIOS switch ups the voltage on each GPU and sets the core frequency at 880MHz per GPU. This is a 50MHz boost to performance per GPU. We will look how much of a performance improvement there really is compared to the default out-of-box configuration. We will also compare this to Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX to see how close it comes to 6970 CFX performance.

Page 5 - Finally, on this page we are going to test overclocking at both BIOS positions. Since there is a lower voltage mode and a higher voltage mode, we want to overclock the video card at both settings and see how high we can get the GPUs at a lower voltage and then how much more performance we can get out of the GPUs when the voltage is increased. We will look at power as well in both modes and compare with Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX.