AMD Radeon HD 6990 Pictured
The pictures, snapped by 4Gamers.net, show a serious beast of a dual-GPU design from AMD.
Demonstrated at the event by head of AMD's graphics business Matt Skynner, the card looks like a beast, comprising a pair of GPUs and a whopping 4GB of GDDR5 memory.
AMD hasn't officially confirmed the specs of the pair of GPUs yet, but we presume they'll be based on the Cayman architecture used in AMD's Radeon HD 6950 and 6970 GPUs. As such, the card is likely to have a total of either 3,072 or 2,816 stream processors.
Pictures of the card snapped at the event by 4Gamer.net reveal a dual-slot design featuring a redesigned cooling system with a centrally-located fan and vents at the front and back, while the backplate has a single DVI port and four mini DisplayPort connectors for video output.
Pricing information for the card was not discussed at the event, although Skynner reportedly claimed that it would be officially launched some time in the first quarter of this year. The card demonstrated by Skynner was described as an engineering sample, although with the launch date so close it's unlikely that the final released product will vary much from what was on show at the event.
Click to enlarge
As a result, the final version of the card is almost guaranteed to include the CrossFireX connector of the engineering sample, although it's not yet clear whether the card - which, thanks to its dual-GPU design, draws significantly more power than the company's other reference boards - will retain the single 6-pin and 8-pin power connectors, or swap them for a pair of 8-pin connectors.
Is AMD's latest flagship design is going to be a sure-fire winner, or will the company have to price it carefully to compete with Nvidia's latest GPUs? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyGoing be the length of the PCI-E connector I'd guess at 13"
But that would also mean that the power draw of this card would be quite big with a size just over 300 km...
As the article says, it is not clear yet what power connection configuration it will be.
Also, a 300km card is rather a large card...:D
I don't think I want to know.
I'm probably just being an ignorant twonk but where is the advantage of this compared to sli / xfire which would be considerably cheaper?
By advantage i mean an area where it will outperform a multi-card setup so drastically that it will be worth the undoubtedly astronomical pricetag
Why on Earth would you have a low end board and then spend the serious amount of cash for the GPU? Surely people who would buy this card are rocking high-end setups anyway, and just want to have the ability to CrossFire a pair of pre-Crossfired cards for 4 GPUs...
lower end motherboard doesn't mean less performance, just means more features that you usually don't need. so why spend more on features you don't ever need?
For bragging rights? You underestimate the power of e-peen.
I dunno. The 1GB 6950 is only ~$20 cheaper than the 2GB version (and that is based on RRP, you can actually get 2GB versions that are only $10 more expensive). I think the two GPUs and the sheer amount of stuff (the amount of copper, components etc) on the PCB is going to be the real cost.
yes i know, its a big card for mini-itx setup, and you would need to find a case to match, along with a pokey power supply, also not ideal for mini-itx, but hey, thats what modding is about, isn't it?
Even if my mb couldnt crossfire/sli, I'd buy a new one and 2 x 560ti's
will be faster, cooler, quieter and cheaper.
I'm sure there is some sort of single slot niche for this card but surely gamers get bigger e-peen if they have 2 graphics cards.
No... the 5970 is two 5970s at lower clocks. Both of the GPUs in the 5870 had all 1600 shaders of the 5870, not the 1440 shaders of the 5850. They just were underclocked in comparison to the 5870.
It shouldn't make anything of it. The GPU is addressing it, not the CPU.
Both cards duplicate the VRAM in crossfire and SLI. So each GPU only has 2GB, the same as a reference 6950 or 6970. It might be a little high at the moment, but Eyefinity triple monitor setups are being bottlenecked by 1GB per GPU. They might have been fine with 1.25gb or 1.5gb like some nvidia chips, but why not just do an even 2gb?
As you and others have said, the 4GB of RAM on the 6990 is a 2x2GB pair, and so only exposes 2GB of addressable memory to the OS, if that's what you mean by the GPU addressing it.
XP 32-bit can address ~4GB of RAM in total, including GPU RAM - Which would leave roughly 1.75GB of usable physical memory judging by how XP typically addresses memory; which was my point.
It's purely an academic thing, as nobody in their right mind would pair a 6990 with XP, but I'm curious to see just what would happen if XP was forced to deal with a graphics card that actually exposed 4GB of addressable RAM to the OS, or multiple cards that do so collectively; on top of the system RAM, since it usually addresses the graphics memory before the system, thus squeezing the system RAM into the remaining addressable range.
If it were left with no address space for the system RAM would it refuse to boot, or is it smart enough to reserve enough system memory for itself before addressing the graphics memory?
The notion reminds me of how 98SE behaves on systems with more than 512MB of system RAM.
I can only see 5 - shouldn't a card like thise one support 6 monitors for eyefinity?
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3602/sponsored_feature_ram_vram_and_.php?page=3
edit: correction of facts
Will Nvidia have a single card solution to compete?
Although I guess the actual benchmarks we want to see, are this card, vs Nvidia's equivalent, vs ATi's most powerful single card, vs Nvidia's most powerful single card, vs both ATi's and Nvidia's most powerful single cards in crossfire and SLI setups. A benchmark I look forward to immensely!
The next few months looks like it will be a great time to pick up a new card, particularly at the sub £200 segment of the market.
Also, guru3d tested the 6800 cards in crossfire and said "I can already tell you this though, this was the first time ever we had no issues with drivers, and yeah, in most cases the CrossfireX scaling was just extraordinary good."
A card like this would be great for eyefinity (obviously)
Or screens which allow you to daisychain displayport.
When you consider that angle, it would be pretty incredible to build a smaller system (12 x 20 x 32cm) which can power 12 displays. Granted, when you have a display array like that, I'm sure a computer tower wouldn't get in your way so much.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/video/amd-shows-upcoming-radeon-hd-6990-flagship/
Answers the question of the power connectors: we will have 1 8 pin and 1 6 pin.
It also claims that 3072 stream processors is confirmed.
a single normal sized displayport would help. considering displayport monitors give a free normal sized displayport cable.
They normally bundle a few adaptors.
Displayport *might* not be mainstream *yet* but it soon will be - there was a recent article explaining how Intel, AMD, Samsung, Lenovo, Dell, etc are all planning to migrate towards Displayport and HDMI for their products.
http://vr-zone.com/articles/confirmed-nvidia-releasing-geforce-gtx-590-in-february-with-dual-gf110/10954.html
i expect them to be less than 2x price of their GPU counter parts.
eg. 6990 is two 6970 then it will sell for less than £550
eg. 590 is two 570 then it will sell for less than £600
it's multi-GPU on a stick, multi-GPU setup have always been cheaper than a single faster GPU
This sounds about right. And yes, they will sell!
Shame they don't go for that.
there probably will be a DP to hdmi converter included for a card in its price range.