XFX AMD Radeon HD 6990 4GB Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,826 words · ~9 min read
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ah yes it is highend and I mean very
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highend graphics card unboxing time
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again this is the Radeon HD
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6990 it features hd3d technology
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Infinity technology apparently a PCI Express 2.1
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bus although that's not really a feature at this point but this is check this out
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four gigs of gddr5 memory yes four gigs
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of memory on a consumer level graphics card Madness and you can see that's one
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of the things they actually also call out here we've got five star XFX support
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okay something about radon Graphics so remember five star XFX support I'm not
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sure what all of the stars are exactly but I can tell you a few of the things
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so they do have a Moder friendly warranty which means that you can remove
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the stock cooler although there are some reasons not to remove the stock cooler
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of this particular motherboard um because the thermal compound that
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they're using is some kind of fancy phase change thermal compound which it's
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you can't really replace with anything equivalent so it's uh engineered for the
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best cooling performance out of the box
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okay so it's got that going for it and then it's also got double lifetime
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warranty which means that even if you sell the card you can transfer the
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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
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back here so 4 gigs yeah yeah we got that 4 gigs of memory ifinity with
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Native support for up to four simultaneous displays now that's funny because I've seen documentation saying
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it supports up to five so why don't you guys just give me a moment here all
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right well my confidential AMD slide deck doesn't seem to really give me much
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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
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next few days I will find out for certain one way or the other by just
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trying it same way I often do things okay so here we go here's another featur
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list direct X11 ifinity technology 1080p full HD duh DisplayPort 1.2 HD 1.4a 7.1
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HD surround sound out via HDMI and 4 GB
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of ddr5 which I guess they felt they better mention again since it wasn't in
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enough other places on the box I'm just kidding it was okay so
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let's put the box here let's put this down here and there we go XFX force.com
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just in case you guys want to check out their website so I'm not going to talk
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too much until we get the card itself out here so we got a North America
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limited warranty which I believe is going to be
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lifetime but I believe you better uh go make sure you register that so yeah
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there you go okay something about AMD graphics card there's some drivers
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download the latest from the AMD website okay quick install
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guide okay how to use your driver
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CD and then we've got one of those sweet X effects do not disturb I'm gaming door
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hangers all right some foam good quality
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foam nice closed cell stuff and there it
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is the $
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6990 so let's go ahead and pull that out
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that is a long graphics card
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wow okay so let's just make sure we've
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finished with all the accessories and then we'll get to the card
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itself here we go this is here
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and it has some more accessories in it so a couple things first of all we have
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a mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter okay
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next we have a mini DisplayPort
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to can't tell if it's active or passive well let's say it's passive DVI and then
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we have aha mini DisplayPort to active
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DVI all right so it's ifinity ready out of the box even if you have have uh
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three DVI monitors okay we've got a crossfire
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bridge and let's go ahead and pile all
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of this back into here pile this into
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here let's move this out of the way and
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let's admire this little engineering Marvel here that is as of the time of
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filming this the fastest graphics card
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in the world so that's it the radon 6990
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let's start at the front so we've got kind of a classic ATI graphic on the
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front which XFX has been using since they started making AMD or ATI whichever
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you prefer graphics cards on the top we find something a couple things that are
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very interesting so we've got their new color scheme which debuted with the 6870
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we have two8 pin connectors now that is a first for a mass production card and
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uh previously what we've seen is a six plus an eight typically on the very
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high-end cards but there you have it we now have two 8 Pin connectors remember 8
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Pin connectors are capable of delivering up to 150 watts of power each to the
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card plus the 75 Watts that can be delivered via the PCI E slot so remember
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that for later okay we also have something here which we're going to
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remove which is a little Caution tape so
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caution read something before something take it off okay so caution read owner's
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manual before removing why would you want to do that you ask the reason you
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would want to do that is because by removing this and changing the bio switch position
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remember most of the new 6900 series cards come with this dual bio switch by
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changing the position you are actually going to overclock your card well beyond
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the PCI Express spec and unlock it to a
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full dual 6970 Graphics cores in here versus the
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slightly downclocked default shipping configuration so this is not necessarily
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guaranteed to work with every system and every power supply and every motherboard
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but AMD has left the option there for users to Tinker with the stock
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configuration of the card and overclock it out of the factory just with the
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flick of a switch very cool okay back of
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the card okay there's like a rubber couple
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rubber grommets here on the back of the card not really sure what those are for
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but that's interesting all right we've also got two back plates here holding on
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the uh the vapor chamber heat sinks that are hidden by this shroud there's our
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PCI Express slot there at the bottom let's go ahead and flip it over again
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where we will see not really much of anything interesting okay back to the
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front oh yeah something else of note is that this heat sink design is not the
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typical one that we've seen with AMD's dual uh dual GPU configurations so it
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uses a center fan instead of one fan at
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the side and then two heat sinks on the one side and then all rear exhaust so
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this is a half rear exhaust half internal exhaust designed card so what
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that means is that am was able to use two identical heat sinks in the past
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they were typically using an aluminum heat sink closest to the fan where it
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gets the cooler air and then a copper heat sink further away from the fan to
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get a little bit more cooling power out of it but now since both gpus are cooled
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in the same way by the fan they actually both use identical Vapor chamber coolers
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so there you can see that there all the exhaust comes out this way you can
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actually kind of see the yeah there you can see the copper of the vapor chamber
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with the aluminum fins on top of it and then let's go ahead and turn the card
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around this way where we will be also be able to see the fins down there I hope
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you guys can see that there you go as well as the rear output so this doesn't
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really shed any additional light on whether or not it supports five
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simultaneous displays out so um so yeah
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we'll figure that out later but we've got one DVI and four mini DisplayPort I
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can tell you guys now it supports at least four-way ifinity so uh yeah we'll figure
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out exactly how much further than at least that it goes later on now power
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for this board actually let's talk let's talk
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overall specs here so by default the
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card comes clocked at 830 MHz and it is
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capable of 5.1 Tera flops of overall compute performance but if you go ahead
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and flick this switch it actually turns up the core voltages and it overclocks
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the cores to 880 MHz now in terms of the
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stream processors and all of the other architectural um information about these
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cores on here these are both full Cayman cores so it is essentially 269 70s once
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you have flipped the switch and unlocked the full power of the board now speaking
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of power it runs at a maximum power of
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well for typical gaming load about 350 Watts when you do not flip the switch
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and it can get as high as 415 Watts or
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even as high as 450 at the very maximum that is the
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ceiling that is built into Power tune if you flip the switch so what is powertune
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power tune basically was introduced a little while back and is AMD's way of
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controlling the TDP or the overall thermal the overall thermals of a card
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that is capable of well up to 450 watt
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so it controls the clock speeds in order
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to ensure that you're not going to burn out your card with something like a furmark but it also allows you to
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deliver maximum performance in 3D games
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now the overall design of the board had to accommodate the incredible power of
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delivering well electricity to two of these gpus 4 gigs of memory everything
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else that they're doing so AMD is using an allnew voltera powered vrm that is
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going to deliver clean stable power to
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your $69.90 card so thank you for checking out my unboxing don't forget to
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subscribe to lus Tech tips as well as my ncixcom channnel where I'm going to be
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filling you guys in with more details about this card as I have them don't
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forget to subscribe I think I just said that oh well