AMD HD6990 Review

Up Close

The HD6990 follows the current AMD theme of a black shroud with three red stripes upon it. It’s odd that after destroying any brand identification with the renumbering fiasco they’d go to such lengths to show the cards similarities.

Instead of twin DVI and a HDMI or DisplayPort, the HD6990 supports Eyefinity via DisplayPort and adaptors. So you have a single DVI for most of us, and four mini-DP outputs should you desire surround gaming.

      

Nothing warms the heart quite like the sight of two GPUs on a single board. You can feel the power flowing through before it isn’t fired up.

Cooling taken care of with the same cooler we saw on the HD6970, just with an extra GPU block and the fan relocated to the centre. It doesn’t fill us with confidence we have to admit. Heat begets heat.

      

Once the main body of the cooler is removed we can see the board in all it’s glory. A few of the features we’ll get to on the next page, but for now we have the two GPUs bookending the power phases and encircled themselves by the GDDR5.

Apparently the HD6990 has “phase-change thermal interface material”. Sure looks like regular paste to us.

      

Keeping two GPUs happy means two 8pin PCIe power inputs, but that’s obviously less than are needed for two, even medium, cards. Makes cable routing far easier.