AMD Radeon HD 7990 Launch Date Revealed

For those of you who have a very strong ability to remember dates (or use Google) then you may recall that Nvidia’s GTX 690 was launched on May the 3rd 2012. Why is that significant? Well because it is mid-April 2013 and we still haven’t seen AMD release an official HD 7990. Strangely, its partner(s) have had that opportunity first with Powercolor designing their own HD 7990 last year (which Club 3D and VTX3D also used) and with ASUS designing their Ares II HD 7990 or HD 7970X2 for this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics Show).

However, the long wait appears to be over as we now have an official launch date for AMD’s dual GPU beast. According to sources the HD 7990 will be released on April the 24th (2013) and reviews of the card should already be underway. According to earlier reports the specifications should be:

• Two Tahiti 7970 GPUs
• Direct X 11.1
• PCI Express 3.0
• 950MHz Core Clock
• 1500MHz Memory Clock (6GHz effective)
• Two 8 Pins – 375W TDP
• 2 X 3072MB of GDDR5
• Dual Link DVI and 4 mini Displayports
• Eyefinity support

You may be wondering what makes this HD 7990 different from last year’s HD 7990 release, well apart from it being codenamed “Malta” instead of “New Zealand” there are actually a few differences. The main difference is with regards to power optimisations that mean this card is capable of running off “only” two 8 pin PCI express connectors. Another difference is that it will boast a dual slot cooling design for maximum compatibility on most motherboards and cases.

Many people will still be wondering how the AMD HD 7990 is received by reviews with the new frame-rating issue in mind. This basically showed the community that CrossFire 7970s dropped more than half of their frames as “runt” (broken/out-of-sync) frames giving effective frame rates the same as (or sometimes lower than) a single HD 7970 which essentially means you are producing extra heat and power for nothing. Frame rating aside though many people will still be highly excited for this release. What are your thoughts on the HD 7990 coming this month?

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