Gadgetory

ah yes it is high-end and I mean very high-end graphics card unboxing time again this is the Radeon HD 6990 it features HD 3d technology eyefinity technology apparently a PCI Express 2.0 one bustle that's not really a feature at this point but this is check this out four gigs of gddr5 memory yes four gigs of memory on a consumer-level graphics card madness and you can see that's one of the things they actually also call out here we've got five star XFX support okay something about Radeon graphics so remember five star XFX support I'm not sure what all of the stars are exactly but I can tell you a few of the things so they do have a modder friendly warranty which means that you can remove the stock cooler although there are some reasons not to remove the stock cooler this particular motherboard because the thermal compound that they're using is some kind of fancy phase-change thermal compound which it's you can't really replace with anything equivalent so it's engineered for the best cooling performance out of the box okay so it's about that going for it and then it's also got double lifetime warranty which means that even if you sell the card you can transfer the warranty to someone else this is an XFX card so that's why you get those benefits let's see what we got on the back here so four gigs yeah yeah we got that four gigs of memory I finiti with native support for up to four simultaneous displays now that's funny because I've seen documentation saying it supports up to five so why don't you guys just give me a moment here alright well my confidential AMD slide deck doesn't seem to really give me much indication in one way or the other so what we're going to do is we're going to break open the seals and then over the next few days I will find out for certain one way or the other by just trying it same way I often do things okay so here we go here's another featureless DirectX 11 eyefinity technology 1080p full HD display port 1.2 HDMI 1.4 a 7.1 HD surround sound out a via HDMI and four gigabytes of ddr4 which I guess they felt they better mention again since it wasn't enough other places on the Box I'm just kidding it was okay so I'll put the box here let's put this down here and there we go XFX force calm just in case you guys want to check out their website so I'm not going to talk too much until we get the card itself out here so we bought a North American limited warranty which I believe is going to be lifetime but I believe you better go make sure you register that so yeah we go okay some of the imodium do graphics cards are some drivers download the latest from the AMD website okay quick install guide okay how to use your driver CD and then we've got one of those sweet X effects do not disturb I'm gaining door hangers alright some foam good quality foam nice closed cell stuff and there it is the 6990 go ahead and pull it out that is a long graphics card Wow okay let's just make sure we've finished with all the accessories and then we'll get to the card itself here we go this is here and it has three minutes so a couple things first of all we have a mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter okay next we have a mini DisplayPort to tell if it's active or passive well let's say it's passive DVI and then we have aha mini DisplayPort to active DVI all right so it's Eyefinity ready out of the box even if you have three DVI monitors okay we've got a crossfire bridge and let's go ahead and pile all of this back into here pile this into here let's move this out of the way and let's admire this little engineering marvel here that is as of the time of filming this the fastest graphics card in the world so that's it the Radeon 6990 let's start at the front so we've got kind of a classic ATI graphic on the front which XFX has been using since they started making AMD or ATI whichever you prefer graphics cards on the top we find something a couple things that are very interesting so we've got their new color scheme which debuted with the 6870 we have two eight pin connectors now that is a first for a mass production card and previously what we've seen is a six plus an eight typically on the very high end card but there you have it we now have two eight pin connectors remember eight pin connectors are capable of delivering up to 150 watts of power each to the card plus the 75 Watts that can be delivered via the PCIe slot so remember that for later okay we also have something here which we are going to remove which is a little caution tape so caution read something before something take it off okay so caution read owner's manual before removing why would you want to do that you ask the reason you would want to do that is because by removing this and changing the bios switch position remember most of the new 6900 series cards come with this dual BIOS switch by changing the position you are actually going to overclock your card well beyond the PCI Express spec and unlock it to a full dual 6970 graphics cores in here versus the slightly down clocked default shipping configuration so this is not necessarily guaranteed to work with every system and every power supply and every motherboard but AMD has left the option there for users to tinker with the stock configuration of the card and overclock it out of the factory just with the flick of a switch very cool ok back of the card okay there's like a rubber couple rubber grommets here on the back of the card not really sure what those are for but that's interesting alright we've also got two back plates here holding on the the vapor chamber heat sinks that are hidden by this shroud there's our PCI Express slot there at the bottom let's go ahead and flip it over again where we will see not really much of anything interesting okay back to the front oh yeah something else of note is that this heatsink design is not the typical one that we've seen with AMD's dual dual GPU configurations so it uses a center fan instead of one fan at the side and then two heat sinks on the one side and then all rear exhaust so this is a half rear exhaust half internal exhaust designed card so what that means is that a Mew is able to use two identical heat sinks in the past they were typically using an aluminum heatsink closest to the fan where it gets the cooler air and then a proper heatsink further away from the fan to get a little bit more cooling power out of it but now since both GPUs are cooled in the same way by the fan they actually both use identical vapor chamber coolers so there you can see that they're all the exhaust comes out this way you can actually kind of see the video there you can see the copper of the vapor chamber with the aluminum fins on top of it and then let's go ahead and turn the card around this way where we will be also be able to see the fins down there I hope you guys can see that there you go as well as the rear output so this doesn't really shed any additional light on whether or not it supports five simultaneous displays out so so yeah we'll figure that out later but we've got one DVI and four mini DisplayPort I can tell you guys now it supports at least four-way Eyefinity so yeah we'll figure out exactly how much further than at least that it goes later on now power for this board actually let's talk let's talk overall specs here so by default the card comes clocked at 830 megahertz and it is capable of 5.1 teraflops overall compute performance but if you go ahead and flick this switch it actually turns up the core voltages and it overclocks the cores to 880 megahertz now in terms of the stream processors and all of the other architectural information about these cores on here these are both full Kamin course so it is essentially two 69 70s once you have flipped the switch and unlocked the full power of the board now speaking of power it runs at a maximum power of well for typical gaming load about 350 Watts when you do not flip the switch and it can get as high as for 15 watts or even as high as 450 at the very maximum that is the ceiling that is built into power tune if you flip the switch so what is power toon power toon basically was introduced a little while back in his AMD's way of controlling the TDP or the overall thermal the overall thermals of a card that is capable of well up to 450 watts so it controls the clock speeds in order to ensure that you're not going to burn out your card but something like a fir mark but it also allows you to deliver maximum performance in 3d games now the overall design of the board had to accommodate the incredible power of delivering electricity to two of these GPUs four gigs of memory everything else that they're doing so aim DS using an all-new volterra powered vrm that is going to deliver clean stable power to your 6990 card so thank you for checking out my unboxing don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips as well as my NCIX comm channel where I'm going to be filling you guys in with more details about this card as I have them don't forget to subscribe I think I just said that oh well