this video is brought to you by the Corsair Vengeance k70 and k95 these
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vengance gaming to learn more all right so we're a little late on a 7990
unboxing but quite frankly AMD was a little late on releasing the product as
well because the GTX 690 has been around for quite a while and this right here is
AMD's direct competitor to the GTX
690 so a GTX 690 is basically 2 GTX 680s
and a Radeon 7990 is basically two Radeon 7970 so just like the last
generation product the 6990 which was released a long time ago this features
two full Tahiti cores that's 248 stream
processors as well as a dual 384-bit
memory bus with 6 GB of gddr5 and that's
clocked at 6 GHz so remember guys with
dual GPU Solutions you only get half of
the RAM as your usable RAM just like you would with any SLI or Crossfire X setup
now there was a time when I really couldn't recommend dual GPU Solutions so
or dual GPU cards and that was maybe you know when the 7950 gx2 rolled out yeah
was super powerful but SLI scaling issues at the time aside the biggest
problem with it was man did that thing run hot and man was it loud they have
completely overhauled the way this works so in spite of the fact that this is a
dual slot card see no triple slot solution it is still capable of running
at a 950 MHz base clock with a 1 GHz
boost clock which is faster by a significant margin than a regular 7970
and almost the same speed as the 150 MHz
boost clock that we see out of a 7970 GHz Edition so full-fledged gpus only a
slight reduction in clock speed and a dual slot solution and the card's
actually quiet in terms of Acoustics it is very similar to the GTX 690 so this
is enabled by a very very custom cooling solution that is capable of dissipating
the 375 watt TDP that this card has now that
375 watt TDP is about 75 Watts more than
on the GTX 690 but by I mean check this
out by implementing this cooler that has four heat pipes attached to massive
aluminum fins so I'll show you the heat pipes here as well so these are coming
out of both sides as well as a huge
chunk of copper in the middle here on the vrm solution and more heat pipes
more copper fins all the way over here more heat pipes hopefully you can see
those through the uh through the ventilation holes there more heat pipes
more copper fins almost the entire front of the card is covered in aluminum fins
copper heat pipes and that chunk of copper right there for vrm so what AMD
has done is they have implemented this solution with three fans and a massive
what I'd normally consider to be high-end aftermarket air cooler to to
keep the card as quiet and as cool as a GTX 690 in spite of the higher TDP one
of the other things that really helps this card is it does have Tahiti core so
it features their zeroc core technology which means that when you're idling only
one of the gpus is even powered on the other one basically goes off and there's
actually an indicator light here on the back that tells you hey uh I'm turned
off don't worry about me right now so yeah in addition to zero core technology
I'd like to take you guys on a bit of a tour of the card itself so on the back
we find a full back plate as we've come to expect from AMD's very high-end cards
with two cutouts for the GPU cores
themselves so you can see exactly where those two Tahiti cores are located you
can also see the PCI Express 3.06 X interface at the bottom as well as a
crossfire connector up here at the top only a single Crossfire connector on
this card because dual GPU cards so often you see guys on the Forum oh I'm
running for GTX 69 know you aren't because dual GPU cards count as two
cards in SLI or Crossfire already so you can only link them 2 by two or two times
two for a total of four gpus that's the maximum supported by both AMD and NVIDIA
at this time on the top of the card we've got two8 pin connectors so yes it
consumes a lot of power about 10% more
than a single 7970 at idle and somewhere
between a GTX 690 and dual 797s under
low this is in large part due to the very
selective binning process that AMD goes through in order to get two gpus that
can go on a single card and be running at like a gigahertz when they're boosted
up and not go over that 375 watt power
limit on the rest of the top of the card you've got a bio switch up here as well
as just a very very Sleek looking but
well ventilated cooler shroud so one thing to note about these Open Air
Design coolers is that while they do keep the card itself very cool they
exhaust the heat into your case so down here along the bottom of the card you
can see it's more open ventilation so unlike a GTX 690 or even a Radeon 69 H
actually 6990 went both ways uh so unlike a 4870 X2 it's going to exhaust
heat into your case as opposed to just out the ventilation holes at the back
you will get a little bit coming out the back but it's yeah it's going to be it's
going to be quite limited so you're going to want to make sure you have a case with great ventilation on the back
we can also see the io so we've got a DVI port as well as four mini display
port ports so you can easily run a maxed out ifinity setup off of this single
card so the real question here is for a $1,000 graphics card yeah I'm going to
mention price I usually don't because sometimes they change not expecting this
one to change anytime soon what is the compelling value ad because you can
either get two Tahiti cores or basically a trip to Tahiti and it's up to you
which one of those is better so there's three cards at that price point there's
the $ 7990 there's the GTX 690 and there's the
GTX Titan these are very different solutions so 690 being a bit of an older
card has 2x 2 gig memory frame buffers
so the problem with that is it's just not really enough memory to run at
something like a 4K resolution and expect to be able to put sort of high
res texture packs or anything like that on your games GTX Titan has 6 gigs of
GPU memory but it's a single single GPU
solution so while it gives more consistent performance it doesn't
necessarily have the raw horsepower that something like 7990 does or something
like gtx690 does okay which puts 7990
somewhere in the middle where it has three gigs of memory that's usable okay
so 6 gigs total it has slightly more
well it has significantly more power than a GTX Titan coming in very close to
something like a GTX 690 and but there's
more okay so okay so it has higher power consumption than 690 significantly
higher power of consumption than Titan it's about the same volume as 690
whereas Titan is quieter and it consumes more power and outputs more heat than
either of those two cards but AMD says
never settle and never settle indeed this card comes with eight games or at
least it did at launch and AMD will continue bu all appearances to support
never settle so if you get a card that's $1,000 but it comes with a few hundred
worth of games is that a compelling value add to
you are you willing to sacrifice a little bit on your power bill over the next little while or have a slightly
hotter room or you have to run your air conditioning higher or whatever else
it's totally up to you and that is all aside from the FCAT issue remember guys
frame capture has become the new deao standard for how to Benchmark graphics
cards that's where you're looking at the actual output frames as opposed to the
frames that are requested to be drawn by the card which is what a program like
fraps does and AMD has a new driver coming that will resolve the issue with
stuttering with their dual GPU Solutions but we haven't seen it yet so it's hard
to say exactly how that's going to perform so I know that was a lot of
information in a very short period of time but if you're shopping for $1,000
graphics card basically what you need to know is AMD's higher performance driver
is coming it does consume more power and output more heat but it comes with a
whack ton of games in the box which might make that a compelling solution
for you thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Radeon HT
77990 don't forget to subscribe to L Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and
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