AMD Radeon 6990 4GB Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look
Today as we’re looking at a reference card, we see a distinct reference design that we’ve seen on other cards in the 6900 series, but with a slightly different layout. We mainly seeing the fan take a move from the end of the card to the middle to distribute the best airflow to the two GPU cores.

The likes of some Nvidia cards have seen a triple cooler design to offer the best thermal performance, but even a power house of a card like the 6990 still only sees a dual slot design, showing that AMD still know what they’re doing in terms of cooling and efficiency.

The card uses a standard PCI-Express 2.1 x16 interface to make connection with your motherboard.

As expected, you see two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors to aid in powering this beast of a card and thankfully AMD have thought ahead with the design by placing the connectors on the top of the card as opposed to the end. This is all down to the length of the card as some users may have issues installing it into their cases, and having the connectors on the end would just add to their problems.

AMD’s marketing department really thought this card through and assumed that a lot of users will not only want two physical GPU cores working hard at powering games, but may even want four and have therefore given this card its very own CrossFire connector to enable you to install a secondary 6990 graphics card for some epic awesomeness.

Speaking of awesomeness, AMD have their very own awesome switch. Technically it’s the AUSUM but it sounds the same if you say it when drunk and hopping on one foot. It stands for Antillies Unlocking Switch for Uber Mode. Oh dear AMD, oh dear! In short it gives a turbo mode in essence by upping the core clocks of the GPU’s from the stock 830MHz to 880MHz whilst also raising the voltage for some extreme overclocking.

Connections are plentiful but are all very much the same, but there is method in the madness. We see a standard DVI connector as well as four mini DisplayPort connectors, which once used in conjunction with the various dongles on sale (Sapphire make some good ones) you will be able to output into your preferred connection.