7990 amd: AMD Radeon HD 7990 Specs

91 Comments

AMD Radeon HD 7990 ReviewMeet The Radeon HD 7990New Games, FCAT, & The TestDiRT: ShowdownTotal War: Shogun 2Hitman: AbsolutionSleeping DogsCrysis: WarheadFar Cry 3Battlefield 3Civilization VBioshock InfiniteCrysis 3SyntheticsComputePower, Temperature, & NoiseFinal Thoughts

As always, last but not least is our look at power, temperature, and noise. Next to price and performance of course, these are some of the most important aspects of a GPU, due in large part to the impact of noise. All things considered, a loud card is undesirable unless there’s a sufficiently good reason – or sufficiently good performance – to ignore the noise.

AMD for their part is clearly focusing on all of this with the 7990, both compared to the 6990 before it, and to the alternative unofficial 7990s that are already on the market. On the power front their binning has enabled them to get a dual-GPU Tahiti card out at 375W. Meanwhile on the temperature front, the style of open air cooler used on the 7990 typically affords good-to-great thermal performance with very little noise for the performance. AMD has measured their 7990 as being even quieter than GTX Titan, so we’ll see just how that pans out in our tests.

Radeon HD 7990 Voltages
7990 Max Boost	7990 Base	7990 Idle
1.2v	1. 17v	0.85v

With AMD binning chips to put together the 7990, it comes as no surprise that voltages are lower than the 7970GE. The load voltage in the 1GHz boost state is 1.2v, and it drops to 1.17v for 950MHz. This coupled with the lower leakage aspects of AMD’s selected GPUs is where the bulk of the hard work is done in keeping 7990’s power consumption down.

Normally this is the part where we look at voltage versus clockspeed in-depth, but as Tahiti is an older PowerTune 1.0 part, it’s still based around a handful of DPM states with a number of inferred states in between. As a result we don’t have a good idea of what the 7990 is running at for clockspeeds at any given moment; only that it frequently jumps between the boost state and the high state in most games. Looking at our performance relative to the 7970GE CF, the performance gap in most games is clearly larger than the clockspeed gap, so the 7990 is likely spending much of its time at 950MHz or lower.

This is also a loss for AMD of course, since they have to maintain their 1.2/1.17v voltages even at throttled clockspeeds. ZeroCore made idle power on the 7990 interesting, and in the next generation of AMD GPUs PowerTune 2.0 should have a noticeable impact on clockspeeds and power consumptions.

On a final note before jumping into our results, although our PowerColor 7990 was a loaner for the Titan launch and has since been returned – and as such we can’t update the performance results – the power/temp/noise results are still valid. So in our forthcoming results we’ll also be looking at how the official 7990 compares to its officially unofficial predecessor.

Idle power consumption is a bit of a head-scratcher at first. Power consumption is clearly down versus the 6990, and even the GTX 690 draws 5W more at the wall. On the other hand it’s 12W higher than the 7970GE CF. To be clear here the 2^nd GPU is definitely powering down on the 7990 – there’s actually a small green LED on the back of the card to indicate when ZeroCore is active – so what we’re seeing is the power consumption of the first GPU, the trickle of power the second GPU pulls, and then everything else.

Among other things the 7990 doesn’t get to power its fans down like the second card in a CrossFire configuration does, so that’s part of the difference. Furthermore there’s the PLX bridge on the 7990 that has to be accounted for, and any differences due to the use of Volterra VRMs. Finally there’s the dumb luck component: some GPUs and cards are just better than others, and this goes for both load and idle.

In any case, despite our initial surprise the 7990 is still the clear winner here as far as dual-GPU cards go. It’s not as low as what we were initially expecting, but it has clearly improved over both the 6990 and PowerColor’s 7990.

Moving on to load power, the 7990 draws right about what we expected it to. The 7990 is a 375W card, and indeed it’s drawing about 75W more than its closest competition, the 300W GTX 690. For AMD this is a mixed blessing, as it means they have 75W more thermal headroom to play with to outperform the competition, but it also means they need to actually deliver that performance to justify the power difference. In BF3 that’s not what we saw at 2560 and 5760, but of course the leader and the performance gap between the GTX 690 and 7990 changes on a per-game basis.

In any case, PowerTune and AMD’s binning are making their presence felt here. For its slightly lower performance the 7990 draws almost 100W less than the 7970GE CF at the wall, and compared to the PowerColor 7990 it’s still 21W less.

FurMark ended up being harder on the 7990 than we expected. Both NVIDIA and AMD throttle it of course, but we’ve never seen it throttled so hard as on the 7990. The 7990 completely stalled at times and momentarily dropped to its medium power state (500MHz) while running FurMark. The results are still enlightening since we’re clearly hitting it peak power limits regardless, but it’s not a very good sustained load in this case.

Nevertheless our power measurements were roughly as expected. Discounting the difference between AMD and NVIDIA in throttling, compared to the 7970GE CF and PowerColor 7990 the difference is 160W-180W in savings. For the slight performance loss this is a very good tradeoff and a clear example of why it’s so important AMD got into the multi-GPU game on the 7000 series, as this can only be achieved by careful binning by the GPU manufacturer.

When it comes to idle temperatures the 7990 is decent, but it’s nothing particularly fantastic. 39C is warmer than what we typically see with open air cards, and for that matter it’s warmer than GTX 690 despite the latter’s higher power draw. On the other hand it’s another clear improvement over the 6990, which idles at 45C.

As for load temperatures, open air coolers have proven to be quite capable, but of course a lot depends on how the card has been tuned. For multi-GPU cards 80C+ is simply a given to maximize performance and minimize noise, and indeed that’s exactly what we’re seeing here. 82C puts the 7990 in the company of both the GTX Titan and GTX 690, which is good company to be in. 82C is well below the limit for Tahiti, and as an added bonus for overclockers this means there’s at least some thermal headroom to play with.

Furmark provides us with similar temperatures. It’s actually a bit cooler than under BF3 due to the inconsistent load presented by AMD’s heavy throttling, but it’s not too far off the mark. It is a good reminder however of another one of the benefits of a single card over multiple cards in CrossFire in a tight case: nothing is getting suffocated by a second card.

Finally we’re to our look at noise levels, one of the areas AMD has heavily focused on and is rather proud of. The 6990 was a beast at both idle and load, so there’s a lot of room and a lot of need for improvement here. When it comes to idle AMD has clearly met their mark; 39.2dB is essentially in the whisper quiet area, and is actually marginally quieter than the open air cooled 7970GE we use. It’s even a bit quieter than the GTX 690, if only by 0.8dB. Compared to the 45.5dB 6990 it’s a massive difference; it’s nearly ¼ the noise in terms of power.

Moving on to load noise however and things become more of a mixed bag than a straight-up victory. Once more AMD has greatly improved over the 6990; though we can’t plot it on this chart, in our old gaming noise test the 6990 hit 66dB in both game and pathological testing. So 54.8dB is downright quiet in comparison. Overall this is louder than our high-end single-GPU cards such as the 7970 and GTX 680, but it’s otherwise an improvement over the likes of the GTX 680 SLI and PowerColor 7990.

The downside here for AMD is that their goal was to beat Titan on noise; by our reckoning they’re well off the mark. 3.8dB isn’t an extreme difference, but it’s a very real difference. 7990 isn’t quieter than Titan, and in fact it’s essentially tied with 690. Now 690 was a quiet card for a dual-GPU card and 7990 joins it in that club, so this is still a good result for the 7990. It’s just not what they were shooting for.

Noise measurements under FurMark end up being a wash due to the inconsistent load presented by AMD’s throttling on the 7990. 55.3 is about right for the GTX 690 at its peak; 52. 5 just isn’t right for the 7990 since we hit 54.8dB with BF3. However pulling in this data does draw out something else: the 7990 at its loudest is quieter than the reference 7970, by nearly 4dB. We’re ultimately comparing a full blower to an open air cooler, but the difference is still staggering.

Ultimately AMD hasn’t been able to best Titan in our noise measurements, but that just makes 7990 among the quietest multi-GPU cards we’ve ever tested. We’ll break down the messy issue of power versus performance in our conclusion, but for now it’s clear that AMD has delivered most of their noise goals with the 7990, making the 7990 an incredible improvement over the 6990 and the PowerColor 7990.

Compute
Final Thoughts
AMD Radeon HD 7990 ReviewMeet The Radeon HD 7990New Games, FCAT, & The TestDiRT: ShowdownTotal War: Shogun 2Hitman: AbsolutionSleeping DogsCrysis: WarheadFar Cry 3Battlefield 3Civilization VBioshock InfiniteCrysis 3SyntheticsComputePower, Temperature, & NoiseFinal Thoughts

PRINT THIS ARTICLE

AMD unleashes Radeon HD 7990: A dual-GPU graphics card beast

One thousand dollars. That’s how much AMD anticipates it will cost you to acquire a video card packing two of its most powerful GPUs on a single dual-slot PCB. AMD has provided us with  reference design hardware, with retail cards expected to follow by the end of the month. So consider this a hands-on preview of the Radeon HD 7990. We’ll follow up with an official review as soon as we get a card that people can actually buy.

The Radeon HD 7990 has a massive heatsink that runs the entire length of the card. Three amazingly quiet fans keep everything cool.

The Radeon HD 7990 is essentially two Radeon HD 7970 cards melded into one. You might call it CrossFire on a card. Each 28nm GPU packs 4.3 billion transistors (8.6 billion in total) and a total of 4096 stream processors to deliver compute performance of a staggering 8.2 teraflops: That’s 8.2 trillion floating-point operations per second. And each processor has a 384-bit interface to 3GB of GDDR5 memory (that’s 6GB in total), so games with large memory footprints perform extremely well on this card.

See that edge connector near the card’s mounting bracket? That will enable you to build a quad-GPU monster system by running two of these cards in CrossFire mode.

The card is capable of supporting up to five displays simultaneously, even if they don’t support DisplayPort multi-streaming, thanks to the presence of four Mini DisplayPort connections and one DVI port. AMD’s Eyefinity technology can support up to six DisplayPort monitors (provided at least one supports multi-streaming), although it’s unlikely that you could run six high-resolution displays at once.

That’s because the DisplayPort standard is capable of delivering maximum bandwidth of 21.6 Gbps. Four 1920-by-1200 displays with color depth of 30 bits per pixel and a refresh rate of 60 frames per second would consume most of that bandwidth. And as I discussed in my earlier DisplayPort multi-streaming primer, playing games with more than three monitors isn’t the best experience because it leaves a bezel in the middle of your view.

Four Mini DisplayPort connections, one DVI port, and AMD’s Eyefinity technology deliver plenty of multi-monitor options.

The new king of the hill

With the Radeon HD 7990, AMD seizes the title of most powerful consumer video card from Nvidia, which earned the title only last February when it shipped its GeForce GTX Titan. That card, which is based on a single GPU, is capable of delivering compute performance 4.5 teraflops, which was considered remarkable at the time. Even in a tri-SLI configuration with three Titans in one system, you’d get “only” 13.5 teraflops. With two 7990s in Crossfire, you’d be swinging 16.4 teraflops.

We had an opportunity to benchmark a number of recent games on the Radeon HD 7990 and were impressed with the performance it delivered, especially at very high resolutions. Our test bench consisted of a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-2600K and 32GB of DDR3/1600 memory installed in an Asus P8Z77-V Pro/Thunderbolt motherboard. At resolution of 1920-by-1080 pixels—such as what you’d get with a mainstream 23- or 34-inch display—the card delivered DiRT Showdown at its Ultra quality setting at a whopping 110. 2 frames per second.

Should you decide to add a Radeon HD 7990 to your rig, make sure it’ll fit: The board measures a full 12 inches long.

Moving up to a more resource-hungry game, the Radeon HD 7990 proved capable of delivering Bioshock Infinite at 1920-by-1080 pixels and Ultra quality settings at 111.6 frames per second. When we connected the PC to a 30-inch panel and cranked the resolution to 2560-by-1600 pixels, Bioshock frame rates dropped to a still eminently playable 74.5 frames per second. And if you’re interested in an immersive three-panel experience, AMD claims its card can deliver the game at Ultra quality and 5760-by-1080 resolution at 59.7 fps. (Note: AMD used a different CPU, motherboard, and memory configuration for its internal tests than we did.)

But can it play Crysis? 

Because no discussion of video card benchmarking would be complete without mentioning Crysis, we benchmarked Crysis 3 at its Ultra preset at resolution of 1920×1080 pixels: The card delivered the game at 37. 1 frames per second. And when we boosted the resolution up to 2560-by-1600 pixels and played the game on a 30-inch panel, frame rates dropped to a still-playable 29 frames per second.

Origin PCOrigin PC will offer Radeon HD 7990 cards across its entire desktop line starting immediately.

Moving to synthetic benchmarks, the Radeon HD 7990, produced the Heaven DirectX 11 benchmark at its Ultra preset and resolution of 1920-by-1080 pixels at 66 frames per second (a score of 1664), and at 2560-by-1600 resolution at 38 fps (a score of 972). The card’s 3DMark DirectX benchmark scores were 138073 for Ice Storm (which is limited to a Direct3D 9 feature set and is therefore the least demanding 3DMark test), 23314 for Cloud Gate (which is limited to a Direct3D 10 feature set), 10707 for Fire Strike (a full DX 11 benchmark), and 5756 for Fire Strike Extreme (a quality preset designed for testing multi-GPU systems).

We would have preferred to report our performance findings in comparison with Nvidia’s Titan video card, but Nvidia didn’t provide one in time for our deadline. We hope to be able to publish comparative numbers based on retail samples of both cards.

As I said at the top of this story, AMD says retail Radeon HD 7990 boards won’t be available for another couple of weeks. But literally moments before I filed this story, I learned that boutique PC manufacturer Origin PC will be offering the 7990 as an option in its Genesis full-tower desktops, Millennium mid-towers, and Chronos small-form-factor systems. Other shops specializing in high-end systems are sure to follow.

Nvidia, the ball is in your court!  

Editor’s Note: If you’re put off by the Radeon HD 7990’s price tag, you should read this story.

COMBO 4 Regional Special | Team

Wi-Fi device

TV Box

5 SIM cards including:

Unlimited calls within the group

200 MB mobile internet

20 TV channels

Internet consumption 0 MB when using Yandex Taxi, Navigator, Disc applications , Music.

List of channels

teamTV additional set-top box — 2500 AMD/month

teamTV mobile TV operates without spending Internet megabytes and is available throughout the country.

You need to download the teamTV application from the App Store or Play Market, then you can activate the teamTV service by dialing *818# from your cell phone, or select the “Register” button on the login page through the teamTV application, then click the “Get Password” button. The received login and password must be entered in the appropriate fields of the teamTV mobile application.

To recover the login and password of the teamTV service, dial *812# from your cell phone, or through the teamTV application on the login page, click «Password recovery».

Using the login received via SMS, you can simultaneously connect to 3 teamTV devices.

The teamTV app is available on all smartphones and tablets running iOS 9.0 and Android 6.0 and above. Television broadcasting is carried out by TEAM LLC.

*Join COMBO 4 Regional Special until 12/31/2020 and get twice faster fixed Internet at 100 Mbps . The offer is valid in Dilijan, Vanadzor and Stepanavan.

Calls to Russia

Free minutes on mob. Beeline Russia network can be used when dialing the called number in the following format: *88* 00 (country code) (phone number) or direct dialing.

When dialing via *88* or direct dialing, the call will not be charged only to telephone numbers of the Beeline Russia cellular network with the following codes.