Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by the Corsair Vengeance k70 and k95 these fully mechanical keyboards are designed for performance gaming visit Corsair comm slash Vengeance gaming to learn more all right so we're a little late on a 7990 unboxing but quite frankly AMD was a little late on releasing the product as well because the GTX 690 has been around for quite a while and this right here is AMD's direct competitor to the GTX 690 so a GTX 690 is basically 2 GTX 680 s and a Radeon 7990 is basically 2 Radeon 7970 s so just like the last generation product the 6990 which was released a long time ago this features two full tkt course that's 2048 stream processors as well as a dual 384 bit memory bus with 6 gigabytes of gddr5 and that's clocked at 6 gigahertz so remember guys with dual GPU solutions you only get half of the RAM as your usable Ram just like you would with any SLI or crossfire X setup now there was a time when I really couldn't recommend dual GPU solutions so our dual GPU cards and that was maybe you know when the 7950 GX 2 rolled out yeah it was super powerful but sli scaling issues at the time aside the biggest problem with it was man did that thing run hot and man was it loud they have completely overhauled the way this work so in spite of the fact that this is a dual slot card see no triple slot solution it is still capable of running at a nine hundred and fifty megahertz base clock with a one gigahertz boost clock which is faster by a significant margin than a regular 7970 and almost the same speed as the 1000 50 megahertz boost clock that we see out of a 79 70 gigahertz Edition so full fledged GPUs only a slight reduction in clock speed and a dual slot solution and the cards actually quiet in terms of acoustics it is very similar to the GTX 690 so this is enabled by a very very custom cooling solution that is capable of dissipating the 375 watt TDP that this card has now that 375 watt TDP is about 75 watts more than on the GTX 690 but by I mean check this out by implementing this cooler that has four heat pipes attached to massive aluminum fins so I'll show you the heat pipes here as well so these are coming out of both sides as well as a huge chunk of copper in the middle here on the vrm solution and more heat pipes more copper fins all the way over here more heat pipes hopefully you can see those through the through the ventilation holes there more heat pipes more copper fins almost the entire front of the card is covered in aluminum fans copper heat pipes and that chunk of copper right there for vrm so what AMD has done is they implemented this solution with three fans and a massive what I'd normally consider to be high-end aftermarket air cooler to keep the card as quiet and as cool as a GTX 690 in spite of the higher TDP one of the other things that really helps this card is it does have to heat eCourse so it features their zero core technology which means that when you're idling only one of the GPUs is even powered on the other one basically goes off and there's actually an indicator light here on the back that tells you hey I'm turned off don't worry about me right now so yeah in addition to zero core technology I'd like to take you guys on a bit of a tour of the card itself so on the back we find a full back plate as we've come to expect from AMD's very high-end cards with two cutouts for the GPU cores themselves so you can see exactly where those two tahiti cores are located you can also see the PCI Express 3.0 16x interface at the bottom as well as a crossfire connector up here at the top only a single crossfire connector on this card because dual GPU cards so often you see guys on the forum oh I'm running for DT x6 and I know you aren't because dual GPU cards count as two cards in sli or crossfire already so you can only link them two by two or two times two for a total of four GPUs that's the maximum supported by both AMD and NVIDIA at this time on the top of the card we've got two eight pin connectors so yes it consumes a lot of power about ten percent more than a single 7970 at idle and the somewhere between a GTX and dual 79 70s under load this is in large part due to the very selective bidding process that AMD goes through in order to get to GPUs that can go on a single card and be running at like a gigahertz when they're boosted up and not go over that 375 watt power limit on the rest of the top of the card you've got a bios switch up here as well as just very very sleek looking but well ventilated cooler shrouds so one thing to note about these open-air design coolers is that while they do keep the card itself very cool they exhaust the heat into your case so down here along the bottom of the card you can see it's more open ventilation so unlike a GTX 690 or even a Radeon 69 actually 6990 went both ways so unlike a 4870 x2 it's going to exhaust heat into your case as opposed to just out the ventilation holes at the back you will get a little bit coming out the back but it's yeah it's going to be it's going to be quite limited so you're going to want to make sure you have a case with great ventilation on the back we can also see the i/o so we've got a DVI port as well as four mini DisplayPort ports so you can easily run a maxed out Eyefinity setup off of this single card so the real question here is for $1000 graphics card yeah I'm going to mention price I usually don't because sometimes they change not expecting this one to change anytime soon what is the compelling value add because you can either get to Tahiti cores or basically a trip to Tahiti and it's up to you which one of those is better so there's three cards at that price point there's the 7990 there's a gtx 690 and there's the gtx titan these are very different solutions so 690 being a bit of an older card has two by two gig memory frame buffers so the problem with that is it's just not really enough memory to run at something like a 4k resolution and expect to be able to put in sort of high res texture packs or anything like that on your games gtx titan has six gigs of GPU memory but it's a single single GPU solution so while it gives more consistent performance it doesn't necessarily have the raw horsepower that's something like 7990 does or something like gtx 690 does okay which puts 7990 somewhere in the middle where it has three gigs of memory that's usable okay so six gigs total it has slightly more the well has significantly more power than a gtx titan coming in very close to something like a gtx 690 and but there's more okay so okay so it has higher power consumption than 690 significantly higher power consumption than Titan it's about the same volume as 690 whereas Titan is quieter and it consumes more power and outputs more heat than either of those two cards but AMD says never settle and never settle indeed this card comes with eight games or at least it did at launch and AMD will continue by all appearances to support never settle so if you get a card that's a thousand dollars but it comes with a few hundred dollars worth of games is that a compelling value ad to you are you willing to sacrifice a little bit on your power bill over the next little while or have a slightly hotter room where you have to run your air conditioning higher or whatever else it's totally up to you and that is all aside from the FCAT issue remember guys frame capture has become the new de facto standard for how to benchmark graphics cards that's where you're looking at the actual output frames as opposed to the frames that are requested to be drawn by the card which is what a program like fraps does and AMD has a new driver coming that will resolve the issue with stuttering with their dual GPU solutions but we haven't seen it yet so it's hard to say exactly how that's going to perform so I know that was a lot of information in a very short period of time but if you're shopping for $1,000 graphics card basically what you need to know is and ease higher performance drivers coming it does consume more power and output more heat but it comes with a wack ton of games in the box which might make that a compelling solution for you thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Radeon HD 7990 don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos