Soldato
8 pin and 6 pin pci-e power ? , the 6970 comes with the same . would not the 6990 use more power than the 6970 ?
-
Competitor rules
Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.
AMD Radeon HD 6990 Pictured Up Close
- Thread starter RavenXXX2
- Start date
Edit: Nevermind I zoomed in and couldn't see a switch after all. This thing does look quite long though. I imagine they have gone for centre fan as the air taking heat out of two chips would need to have fan running at even high speed to keep them anywhere near cool.
At least there are no wood screws
Aye, and them power connectors could do with a good sanding down
Soldato
The 6990 will be making far heavier use of the power containment system, in order to keep its power draw to around 300W. Rather than just seeing the power containment system kick in on odd applications (like furmark / perlin noise), expect it to be a constant feature during most high-intensity gaming.
The result of this is that real-world performance will be somewhat behind that of a 6970 x-fire setup, but the card will be able to drag out as much performance as possible while maintaining a ~300W power draw limit. Undoubtedly there will also be the option of raising this limit past 300W via drivers.
Associate
Yep is a long card 
looks sweet though!
looks sweet though!
Soldato
Looks good.
If its efficient and pretty quiet I might pick one of these up instead of a 580. All assuming it isn't that much more expensive than a 580.
If its efficient and pretty quiet I might pick one of these up instead of a 580. All assuming it isn't that much more expensive than a 580.
I was liking the sound of this card until you raised an interesting point there. Reminds me of the 5870 CF which outperforms the 5970 because of the lower clocks - would've thought they had a solution to the power requirement/heat issues by now.
Regarding the 300W limit of the power board, will GPUs ever go above this by default? An 8-pin carries 150W and a 6-pin 75W, with the remainder coming from the PCIe slot which is another 150W from what I remember. That is 375W which is plenty of overhead and if they used two 8-pins that would be a massive 450W. Probably why manufacturers don't like to go above 300W for each GPU with 8+6-pin connectors because otherwise you'll need 1200W PSU for CF with two 8-pins once under heavy loads. Its just finding the balance in between that.
Soldato
Unfortunately heat and power consumption are fundamentally tied to performance, and as time goes on we're going to see power containment become more important. Rather than "what's the fastest GPU you can make" it will eventually become a case of "what's the most performance you can squeeze from ** Watts?"
There is certainly room for more power to be drawn by a GPU - if you put a GTX480 under water, clock and volt the hell out of it then run furmark I'm sure it'll use over 400W. But the power circuitry on the motherboard and the GPU has to be beefier in order to guarantee that higher power loads can be handled reliably. The PCI-e specification is for 300W maximum, and Nvidia/AMD are reluctant to openly exceed this by too much.
I should say though, I still think that this will be a very good card, and I think that AMD's power containment system will help the 6990 beat nvidia's dual-GPU offering. AMD can use larger GPUs (the full Cayman GPU) and simply contain the power load, whereas nvidia must use the smaller GF104 GPUs in order to avoid breaking much past 300W. Unless nvidia have implemented a more sophisticated power management system of course...
Last edited:
Why on earth are you thinking of upgrading from a 5970,that card will chomp through any game for a very long time to come.
Soldato
Feels old tech now.
That 5970 card needs a good game built for the pc to get the best out of it,have you tried star craft 2 with that card..
Soldato
Not really a fan of these sort of cards, I'd rather get two separate ones and crossfire/SLI them, the results are always better (and admittedly a higher outlay).
Soldato
Don't play Starcrat but I have tried Crysis with everything set to Very High (DX10) and 4x AA on a 1080p resolution. The 5970 just chews it up, lowest FPS i've got so far with it is where you get over the hill and have a look at the whole island right at the start of the game, FPS dropped to around 40 but with the motion blur enabled it still felt like it was 60+.
I'll wait for reviews and see what people think of it before committing to anything.
I'll wait for reviews and see what people think of it before committing to anything.
Soldato
5970 is just brutal rendering power with something like 3200 streaming processors...not a thing it can't easily play. Madness to upgrade from it yet lol 
Associate
Looks strange. I like it!
Why on earth are you thinking of upgrading from a 5970,that card will chomp through any game for a very long time to come.
Agreed as I'm using a 5970 too which manages perfectly fine on any PC games I have which is 350+. Only reason to upgrade from 5970 now, is if your using Eyefinity and need 4GB VRAM or additional DisplayPorts for use on 3+ high-end displays.
It only came out the very end of 2009 and will be fine for another 2-3 years of maxed-out gaming at least. Any issues with below-average framerates is to do with your current CPU bandwidth limiting framerates and not the GPU.