ah yes it is highend and I mean very
highend graphics card unboxing time
again this is the Radeon HD
6990 it features hd3d technology
Infinity technology apparently a PCI Express 2.1
bus although that's not really a feature at this point but this is check this out
four gigs of gddr5 memory yes four gigs
of memory on a consumer level graphics card Madness and you can see that's one
of the things they actually also call out here we've got five star XFX support
okay something about radon Graphics so remember five star XFX support I'm not
sure what all of the stars are exactly but I can tell you a few of the things
so they do have a Moder friendly warranty which means that you can remove
the stock cooler although there are some reasons not to remove the stock cooler
of this particular motherboard um because the thermal compound that
they're using is some kind of fancy phase change thermal compound which it's
you can't really replace with anything equivalent so it's uh engineered for the
best cooling performance out of the box
okay so it's got that going for it and then it's also got double lifetime
warranty which means that even if you sell the card you can transfer the
warranty to someone else this is an XFX card so that's why you get those benefits let's see what we got on the
back here so 4 gigs yeah yeah we got that 4 gigs of memory ifinity with
Native support for up to four simultaneous displays now that's funny because I've seen documentation saying
it supports up to five so why don't you guys just give me a moment here all
right well my confidential AMD slide deck doesn't seem to really give me much
indication one way or the other so what we're going to do is we're going to break open the seals and then over the
next few days I will find out for certain one way or the other by just
trying it same way I often do things okay so here we go here's another featur
list direct X11 ifinity technology 1080p full HD duh DisplayPort 1.2 HD 1.4a 7.1
HD surround sound out via HDMI and 4 GB
of ddr5 which I guess they felt they better mention again since it wasn't in
enough other places on the box I'm just kidding it was okay so
let's put the box here let's put this down here and there we go XFX force.com
just in case you guys want to check out their website so I'm not going to talk
too much until we get the card itself out here so we got a North America
limited warranty which I believe is going to be
lifetime but I believe you better uh go make sure you register that so yeah
there you go okay something about AMD graphics card there's some drivers
download the latest from the AMD website okay quick install
guide okay how to use your driver
CD and then we've got one of those sweet X effects do not disturb I'm gaming door
hangers all right some foam good quality
foam nice closed cell stuff and there it
is the $
6990 so let's go ahead and pull that out
that is a long graphics card
wow okay so let's just make sure we've
finished with all the accessories and then we'll get to the card
itself here we go this is here
and it has some more accessories in it so a couple things first of all we have
a mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter okay
next we have a mini DisplayPort
to can't tell if it's active or passive well let's say it's passive DVI and then
we have aha mini DisplayPort to active
DVI all right so it's ifinity ready out of the box even if you have have uh
three DVI monitors okay we've got a crossfire
bridge and let's go ahead and pile all
of this back into here pile this into
here let's move this out of the way and
let's admire this little engineering Marvel here that is as of the time of
filming this the fastest graphics card
in the world so that's it the radon 6990
let's start at the front so we've got kind of a classic ATI graphic on the
front which XFX has been using since they started making AMD or ATI whichever
you prefer graphics cards on the top we find something a couple things that are
very interesting so we've got their new color scheme which debuted with the 6870
we have two8 pin connectors now that is a first for a mass production card and
uh previously what we've seen is a six plus an eight typically on the very
high-end cards but there you have it we now have two 8 Pin connectors remember 8
Pin connectors are capable of delivering up to 150 watts of power each to the
card plus the 75 Watts that can be delivered via the PCI E slot so remember
that for later okay we also have something here which we're going to
remove which is a little Caution tape so
caution read something before something take it off okay so caution read owner's
manual before removing why would you want to do that you ask the reason you
would want to do that is because by removing this and changing the bio switch position
remember most of the new 6900 series cards come with this dual bio switch by
changing the position you are actually going to overclock your card well beyond
the PCI Express spec and unlock it to a
full dual 6970 Graphics cores in here versus the
slightly downclocked default shipping configuration so this is not necessarily
guaranteed to work with every system and every power supply and every motherboard
but AMD has left the option there for users to Tinker with the stock
configuration of the card and overclock it out of the factory just with the
flick of a switch very cool okay back of
the card okay there's like a rubber couple
rubber grommets here on the back of the card not really sure what those are for
but that's interesting all right we've also got two back plates here holding on
the uh the vapor chamber heat sinks that are hidden by this shroud there's our
PCI Express slot there at the bottom let's go ahead and flip it over again
where we will see not really much of anything interesting okay back to the
front oh yeah something else of note is that this heat sink design is not the
typical one that we've seen with AMD's dual uh dual GPU configurations so it
uses a center fan instead of one fan at
the side and then two heat sinks on the one side and then all rear exhaust so
this is a half rear exhaust half internal exhaust designed card so what
that means is that am was able to use two identical heat sinks in the past
they were typically using an aluminum heat sink closest to the fan where it
gets the cooler air and then a copper heat sink further away from the fan to
get a little bit more cooling power out of it but now since both gpus are cooled
in the same way by the fan they actually both use identical Vapor chamber coolers
so there you can see that there all the exhaust comes out this way you can
actually kind of see the yeah there you can see the copper of the vapor chamber
with the aluminum fins on top of it and then let's go ahead and turn the card
around this way where we will be also be able to see the fins down there I hope
you guys can see that there you go as well as the rear output so this doesn't
really shed any additional light on whether or not it supports five
simultaneous displays out so um so yeah
we'll figure that out later but we've got one DVI and four mini DisplayPort I
can tell you guys now it supports at least four-way ifinity so uh yeah we'll figure
out exactly how much further than at least that it goes later on now power
for this board actually let's talk let's talk
overall specs here so by default the
card comes clocked at 830 MHz and it is
capable of 5.1 Tera flops of overall compute performance but if you go ahead
and flick this switch it actually turns up the core voltages and it overclocks
the cores to 880 MHz now in terms of the
stream processors and all of the other architectural um information about these
cores on here these are both full Cayman cores so it is essentially 269 70s once
you have flipped the switch and unlocked the full power of the board now speaking
of power it runs at a maximum power of
well for typical gaming load about 350 Watts when you do not flip the switch
and it can get as high as 415 Watts or
even as high as 450 at the very maximum that is the
ceiling that is built into Power tune if you flip the switch so what is powertune
power tune basically was introduced a little while back and is AMD's way of
controlling the TDP or the overall thermal the overall thermals of a card
that is capable of well up to 450 watt
so it controls the clock speeds in order
to ensure that you're not going to burn out your card with something like a furmark but it also allows you to
deliver maximum performance in 3D games
now the overall design of the board had to accommodate the incredible power of
delivering well electricity to two of these gpus 4 gigs of memory everything
else that they're doing so AMD is using an allnew voltera powered vrm that is
going to deliver clean stable power to
your $69.90 card so thank you for checking out my unboxing don't forget to
subscribe to lus Tech tips as well as my ncixcom channnel where I'm going to be
filling you guys in with more details about this card as I have them don't
forget to subscribe I think I just said that oh well