Battle of the Kings: AMD Radeon HD 7990 vs. Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 and GeForce GTX TITAN Performance

Final8y · 8 Jul 2013 at 19:29

Over a year ago, Nvidia released its dual-processor GeForce GTX 690, which was the fastest discrete graphics card available at that moment. AMD, the only competitor to Nvidia on the market of gaming graphics products, was unable to respond to that release as quickly as many of us expected. Indeed, the wait was so long that AMD’s partners developed and rolled out their own versions of dual-processor solutions with AMD’s flagship Tahiti XT chips: PowerColor’s DEVIL13 HD7990 and ASUS’s ROG ARES II (with a liquid cooling system). Finally, at the end of April this year AMD itself unveiled the reference variant of its dual-processor card. It is called Radeon HD 7990.

Coupled with the recent arrival of the GeForce GTX Titan, we’ve got three premium-class products priced at $1000 each. We are going to compare them all in this review after taking a closer look at the AMD Radeon HD 7990 2x3GB

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/gr...nvidia-geforce-gtx-690-geforce-gtx-titan.html

Sin_Chase · 8 Jul 2013 at 19:44

Was looking forward to reading that review....left dissappointed.

The Nvidia product has been longer on the market and is better in terms of noise level, power consumption, heat dissipation and compactness, but the AMD features 1.5 times more onboard memory for each GPU. It’s up to you to decide which benefits are heftier.

Do not agree that more on-board memory beats out all of those other measurement points. Especially not when it has been demonstrated time and time again that it's just not all that NEEDED at the moment.

Lack of frame time comparison was also a dissappointment.

Xbit - Must try harder.

whyscotty · 8 Jul 2013 at 19:46

Nice award for a EOL card

http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/amd_eols_radeon_hd_7990_dual_gpu_card.html

Rroff · 8 Jul 2013 at 19:52

Bit poor timing for a 690/7990 review with AMD's new metering drivers coming in less than a month and not touching on frametimes at all is kind of fail in this day and age.

Final8y · 8 Jul 2013 at 20:10

Price is the problem and not the reviews unless it was proven that pacing issues is worse on it than other 7 series CF solutions , it got slammed as soon as consumers saw the price and no different from when the 7 series was launched, look at that price, its slamming time.

Oh and way to late into the generation cycle, people want new stuff and most wont fork out large sums this late in the cycle when new stuff is on the way.

I'm glad it flopped.

Gerard · 8 Jul 2013 at 20:25

One of the selling points of the 7990 was its quietness, according to pc perspective it was roughly the same as the 690 in terms of how audiable the cooler was.

Kaapstad · 8 Jul 2013 at 22:27

Having got a pair of GTX 690s, Two HD 7970s and a bucket full of Titans, for a two GPU solution at the price point they are using I would go for the GTX 690 every time.

Final8y · 8 Jul 2013 at 22:33

Kaapstad said:
Having got a pair of GTX 690s, Two HD 7970s and a bucket full of Titans, for a two GPU solution at the price point they are using I would go for the GTX 690 every time.

The Dual cards cards are both fail for me this around, first the cost and and im not going to buy new Dual cards with only 2GB Vram per GPU with regards to the GTX 690s.

pgi947 · 8 Jul 2013 at 22:33

^so would I kaap, not to mention you can pick up a used 690 for the price of a new 780 these days...I've been looking

Kaapstad · 8 Jul 2013 at 22:41

pgi947 said:
^so would I kaap, not to mention you can pick up a used 690 for the price of a new 780 these days...I've been looking

The thing to watch out for with used GTX 690s is the coolers, mine has had a lot of hard use and are a bit noisy with the fans at 95%, having said that waterblocks will put that right.

whyscotty · 8 Jul 2013 at 22:44

pgi947 said:
^so would I kaap, not to mention you can pick up a used 690 for the price of a new 780 these days...I've been looking

The plot thickens

pgi947 · 8 Jul 2013 at 22:50

Just looking of course, backup plans and all that

@kaap, would be a sin not to cover all that pcb in copper

bru · 8 Jul 2013 at 23:00

Well I was looking forward to reading that right up until page 2

The AMD Radeon HD 7990 is a rather long graphics card. Its length is 310 mm as opposed to the GeForce GTX 690’s 280 mm and the GeForce GTX Titan’s 267 mm. But, in our opinion, the AMD card is more beautiful. Its face side is covered with a glossy black casing with three red fans:

oh dear, I mean really oh dear, glossy black plastic and three bright red fans and they think it is better looking than the metal casings of the 690 and the titan. Well each to their own I guess.

Gerard · 9 Jul 2013 at 00:49

Wonder what the real reason was for the official 7990 coming out so late, made no sense that it took as long as it did, many were expecting it 5 or so months after the 7970.

Kaapstad · 9 Jul 2013 at 01:22

One of the biggest drawbacks with the HD7990 is you can not put two in the same case as they tend to overheat badly with temps hitting over 100c.

With 2 air cooled GTX 690s or even 4 air cooled Titans it is easy to get them running in quad sli. The 4 Titans actually run about 7c cooler than the GTX 690s.

Kaapstad · 9 Jul 2013 at 03:20

pgi947 said:
Just looking of course, backup plans and all that

@kaap, would be a sin not to cover all that pcb in copper

Rossi went from using a pair of HD 7970s to a GTX 690 and was well pleased with the results.

pgi947 · 9 Jul 2013 at 07:21

He did indeed and is what gave me the idea. Only looking as if by some miracle amd manage to completely screw up the new frame pace cf driver.

Yaayuh! · 9 Jul 2013 at 07:28

"Hugs my GTX690"

Love the card.

[Sarcasm]2Gb isn't enough apparently though, i mean, just look at how bad it does in those benchmarks....[/sarcasm]

KillBoY_UK · 9 Jul 2013 at 09:37

bru said:
Well I was looking forward to reading that right up until page 2

oh dear, I mean really oh dear, glossy black plastic and three bright red fans and they think it is better looking than the metal casings of the 690 and the titan. Well each to their own I guess.

I couldn't give a rats ass about how a graphics card or a motherboad looks, how its designed and functions (power/performance etc) is 1000x time more important than how it looks to me

Random Guy · 9 Jul 2013 at 12:13

The poor quality of the review has made me want to go and bench my 680s in SLI all over again! I think I will compile an over-arching CSV of FRAPS bench-times, and then calculate it all into one big average, as well as a per-map average