AMD Radeon HD 7990 Unboxing & Technology Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,670 words · ~8 min read
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this video is brought to you by the Corsair Vengeance k70 and k95 these
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fully mechanical keyboards are designed for performance gaming visit Corsair.com
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vengance gaming to learn more all right so we're a little late on a 7990
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unboxing but quite frankly AMD was a little late on releasing the product as
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well because the GTX 690 has been around for quite a while and this right here is
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AMD's direct competitor to the GTX
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690 so a GTX 690 is basically 2 GTX 680s
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and a Radeon 7990 is basically two Radeon 7970 so just like the last
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generation product the 6990 which was released a long time ago this features
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two full Tahiti cores that's 248 stream
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processors as well as a dual 384-bit
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memory bus with 6 GB of gddr5 and that's
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clocked at 6 GHz so remember guys with
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dual GPU Solutions you only get half of
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the RAM as your usable RAM just like you would with any SLI or Crossfire X setup
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now there was a time when I really couldn't recommend dual GPU Solutions so
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or dual GPU cards and that was maybe you know when the 7950 gx2 rolled out yeah
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was super powerful but SLI scaling issues at the time aside the biggest
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problem with it was man did that thing run hot and man was it loud they have
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completely overhauled the way this works so in spite of the fact that this is a
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dual slot card see no triple slot solution it is still capable of running
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at a 950 MHz base clock with a 1 GHz
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boost clock which is faster by a significant margin than a regular 7970
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and almost the same speed as the 150 MHz
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boost clock that we see out of a 7970 GHz Edition so full-fledged gpus only a
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slight reduction in clock speed and a dual slot solution and the card's
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actually quiet in terms of Acoustics it is very similar to the GTX 690 so this
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is enabled by a very very custom cooling solution that is capable of dissipating
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the 375 watt TDP that this card has now that
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375 watt TDP is about 75 Watts more than
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on the GTX 690 but by I mean check this
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out by implementing this cooler that has four heat pipes attached to massive
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aluminum fins so I'll show you the heat pipes here as well so these are coming
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out of both sides as well as a huge
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chunk of copper in the middle here on the vrm solution and more heat pipes
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more copper fins all the way over here more heat pipes hopefully you can see
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those through the uh through the ventilation holes there more heat pipes
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more copper fins almost the entire front of the card is covered in aluminum fins
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copper heat pipes and that chunk of copper right there for vrm so what AMD
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has done is they have implemented this solution with three fans and a massive
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what I'd normally consider to be high-end aftermarket air cooler to to
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keep the card as quiet and as cool as a GTX 690 in spite of the higher TDP one
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of the other things that really helps this card is it does have Tahiti core so
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it features their zeroc core technology which means that when you're idling only
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one of the gpus is even powered on the other one basically goes off and there's
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actually an indicator light here on the back that tells you hey uh I'm turned
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off don't worry about me right now so yeah in addition to zero core technology
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I'd like to take you guys on a bit of a tour of the card itself so on the back
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we find a full back plate as we've come to expect from AMD's very high-end cards
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with two cutouts for the GPU cores
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themselves so you can see exactly where those two Tahiti cores are located you
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can also see the PCI Express 3.06 X interface at the bottom as well as a
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crossfire connector up here at the top only a single Crossfire connector on
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this card because dual GPU cards so often you see guys on the Forum oh I'm
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running for GTX 69 know you aren't because dual GPU cards count as two
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cards in SLI or Crossfire already so you can only link them 2 by two or two times
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two for a total of four gpus that's the maximum supported by both AMD and NVIDIA
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at this time on the top of the card we've got two8 pin connectors so yes it
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consumes a lot of power about 10% more
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than a single 7970 at idle and somewhere
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between a GTX 690 and dual 797s under
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low this is in large part due to the very
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selective binning process that AMD goes through in order to get two gpus that
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can go on a single card and be running at like a gigahertz when they're boosted
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up and not go over that 375 watt power
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limit on the rest of the top of the card you've got a bio switch up here as well
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as just a very very Sleek looking but
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well ventilated cooler shroud so one thing to note about these Open Air
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Design coolers is that while they do keep the card itself very cool they
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exhaust the heat into your case so down here along the bottom of the card you
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can see it's more open ventilation so unlike a GTX 690 or even a Radeon 69 H
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actually 6990 went both ways uh so unlike a 4870 X2 it's going to exhaust
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heat into your case as opposed to just out the ventilation holes at the back
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you will get a little bit coming out the back but it's yeah it's going to be it's
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going to be quite limited so you're going to want to make sure you have a case with great ventilation on the back
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we can also see the io so we've got a DVI port as well as four mini display
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port ports so you can easily run a maxed out ifinity setup off of this single
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card so the real question here is for a $1,000 graphics card yeah I'm going to
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mention price I usually don't because sometimes they change not expecting this
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one to change anytime soon what is the compelling value ad because you can
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either get two Tahiti cores or basically a trip to Tahiti and it's up to you
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which one of those is better so there's three cards at that price point there's
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the $ 7990 there's the GTX 690 and there's the
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GTX Titan these are very different solutions so 690 being a bit of an older
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card has 2x 2 gig memory frame buffers
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so the problem with that is it's just not really enough memory to run at
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something like a 4K resolution and expect to be able to put sort of high
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res texture packs or anything like that on your games GTX Titan has 6 gigs of
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GPU memory but it's a single single GPU
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solution so while it gives more consistent performance it doesn't
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necessarily have the raw horsepower that something like 7990 does or something
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like gtx690 does okay which puts 7990
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somewhere in the middle where it has three gigs of memory that's usable okay
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so 6 gigs total it has slightly more
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well it has significantly more power than a GTX Titan coming in very close to
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something like a GTX 690 and but there's
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more okay so okay so it has higher power consumption than 690 significantly
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higher power of consumption than Titan it's about the same volume as 690
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whereas Titan is quieter and it consumes more power and outputs more heat than
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either of those two cards but AMD says
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never settle and never settle indeed this card comes with eight games or at
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least it did at launch and AMD will continue bu all appearances to support
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never settle so if you get a card that's $1,000 but it comes with a few hundred
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worth of games is that a compelling value add to
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you are you willing to sacrifice a little bit on your power bill over the next little while or have a slightly
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hotter room or you have to run your air conditioning higher or whatever else
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it's totally up to you and that is all aside from the FCAT issue remember guys
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frame capture has become the new deao standard for how to Benchmark graphics
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cards that's where you're looking at the actual output frames as opposed to the
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frames that are requested to be drawn by the card which is what a program like
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fraps does and AMD has a new driver coming that will resolve the issue with
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stuttering with their dual GPU Solutions but we haven't seen it yet so it's hard
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to say exactly how that's going to perform so I know that was a lot of
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information in a very short period of time but if you're shopping for $1,000
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graphics card basically what you need to know is AMD's higher performance driver
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is coming it does consume more power and output more heat but it comes with a
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whack ton of games in the box which might make that a compelling solution
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for you thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Radeon HT
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77990 don't forget to subscribe to L Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and
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