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FRONTPAGE AMD Radeon HD6990 Graphics Card Review

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Thought I'd add this here to incase our video card section browsers don't venture into benching team territory. I played around with a little tri-fire yesterday afternoon. It took two PSUs; my benching rig PSU is only 650W, so I jumped an 800W to keep the 6990 happy and let the 650W run the rest.

They're not spectacular relative to the rest of the 3x GPU heavy hitters out there, but they're the highest scores I've ever had for sure!


Just to be clear, they're not done yet, those were just safe clocks of 950/1275. I'll be pushing them more when I have more time.

Here's a bonus photo of the (messy) bench as tested. :)

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Nice review!

So how do you think this stacks up to its older brother the 5970? Is the performance increase significant?

I have been trying to find some side by side benchmarks with the 590/5970/6990 but can't seem to see any, the ones I did find were using old 5970 benchmarks where the driver support was terrible. Judging by the specs the 5970 seems like it would perform better with higher AA/AS and it still does have more spu's.

Thoughts?
 
Depends on what you do with the card really. The 6990 will almost certainly out gun the 5970, but if you're already satisfied with the performance of the 5970, you already have a very powerful card.

The 6970 beats the 5870 across the board. Logically, since the 5970 isn't quite two 5870's on one PCB and the 6990 actually is two 6970's (minus a little memory speed) on one PCB, it makes sense that the 6990 would beat the 5970.

If you play DX11 games, there's no question the 6990 would be a good upgrade. If you plan on multiple-monitor gaming, native 5-monitor eyefinity support is also a draw for the 6990.

Unfortunately I don't have a 5970 to test, but it's a safe bet the 6990 would be an improvement. If you're dissatisfied with gaming performance, it's a good one to look at (though so are two 6970's in crossfire, or two 6950's flashed to 6970's if you're feeling frugal). If not, what you have is already a very solid performer.
 
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