PowerColor Radeon HD 6990 CrossFire Review

Name: PowerColor Radeon HD 6990 CrossFire
Brand: PowerColor

W1zzard

on Mar 7th, 2011,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: PowerColor

(20 Comments) »

Introduction

Today, AMD launched its Radeon HD 6990 graphics card, its fastest graphics card, in contention for being labeled the fastest graphics card money can buy. What happens when you pair two of these? You get Radeon HD 6990 CrossFireX, a 1398 Dollar solution that combines four AMD Cayman GPUs, a total of 8 GB of memory, 6144 stream processors, and enough display outputs to make a military-class vehicle simulator using clever use of Eyefinity and HydraVision technologies. Or, you can just bulldoze through DirectX 11 games using HD 6990 CrossFire with a lot of eye-candy turned on, and at par-HD (2560x1600 or 2560x1440) resolutions. This is also going to be the solution overclockers will have an eye out for. Before you proceed, make sure you’ve been through our ASUS Radeon HD 6990 review, where you’ll get to see what the single graphics card is worth.

We are running PowerColor Radeon HD 6990 graphics cards, which stick to AMD’s reference board design. Installing CrossFire is as easy as installing the second card, connecting the power cables, the CrossFire cable to the other card, and enabling HD 6990 CrossFireX in Catalyst Control Center.

	GeForce GTX 480	Radeon HD 6970	GeForce GTX 580	Radeon HD 5970	Radeon HD 6990	Radeon HD 6990 CrossFire
Shader units	480	1536	512	2x 1600	2x 1536	4x 1536
ROPs	48	32	48	2x 32	2x 32	4x 32
GPU	GF100	Cayman	GF110	2x Cypress	2x Cayman	4x Cayman
Transistors	3200M	2640M	3000M	2x 2154M	2x 2640M	4x 2640M
Memory Size	1536 MB	2048 MB	1536 MB	2x 1024 MB	2x 2048 MB	4x 2048 MB
Memory Bus Width	384 bit	256 bit	384 bit	2x 256 bit	2x 256 bit	4x 256 bit
Core Clock	700 MHz	880 MHz	772 MHz	725 MHz	830 MHz	830 MHz
Memory Clock	924 MHz	1375 MHz	1002 MHz	1000 MHz	1250 MHz	1250 MHz
Price	$400	$370	$500	$580	$699	$1398

Test System

Test System - VGA Rev. 14
CPU:	Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte X58 Extreme Intel X58 & ICH10R
Memory:	3x 2048 MB Mushkin Redline XP3-12800 DDR3 @ 1520 MHz 8-7-7-16
Harddisk:	WD Caviar Black 6401AALS 640 GB
Power Supply:	akasa 1200W
Software:	Windows 7 64-bit
Drivers:	GTX 560: 266.56 NVIDIA: 266.58 ATI: Catalyst 11.1 HD 6990: 8.84.3 Beta 2
Display:	LG Flatron W3000H 30" 2560x1600

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

Aliens vs. Predator

Aliens vs. Predator is based on a merger of the Aliens and the Predators franchise: two legendary alien species that are in conflict with each other, fighting to the death with human marines caught in between. The first person shooter game was developed by Rebellion Studios, who also developed the first AVP PC title and released in February 2010. It was one of the first DirectX 11 games with support for new features like Tesselation, which is why AMD heavily promoted it at the time of their DX 11 card launches. We used the AVP benchmark utility with tesselation and advanced DX11 shadows enabled.