Blazing speed, but this card is too expensive for all but the most extreme gamers
❱❱ PRICE £754 (£904incVAT)
It’s more than a year since the fi rst HD 7000 Series cards appeared, but AMD has at last launched a fl agship model – and what a card it is. The Radeon HD 7990 is a dual-core monster, but it comes in at the highest price we’ve ever seen for a graphics card.
The price can be explained in part by the card’s use of two Radeon HD 7970 cores, clocked at 1,000MHz, rather than the normal 925MHz, and also by the 6GB of GDDR5 RAM, which is more than we’ve ever seen on a graphics card. Between them, the twin cores pack in a massive 8.6 billion transistors and 4,096 stream processors.
The HD 7990 blitzed our benchmarks, easily beating the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 (web ID: 373696). It scored 80fps in our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis benchmark, 10fps ahead of the GTX 680, and 4x anti-aliasing hardly slowed it down – it scored 75fps. In Battlefield 3, it zipped through the Ultra quality 1,920 x 1,080 test at 160fps, returning a score of 116fps when 4x anti-aliasing was activated.
It has enough power to handle gaming across three screens at a resolution of 5,760 x 1,080. At Very High quality, it ran Crysis at 52fps and Battlefield 3 at 88fps.
AMD has used serious hardware to keep temperatures down. The bulk of the 306mm-long card is occupied by a huge heatsink, and it’s topped with three 90mm fans that keep the top temperature of the card down to an impressively low 72°C. Power consumption is another story, however: our test rig drew 418W from the mains when stress-tested, and the card requires two eight-pin power connectors.
The HD 7990 is the quickest card on the planet, but it isn’t cheap. For £160 less, you can get two GTX 680s, a configuration that will also comfortably play games across three screens. It’s a remarkable graphics card, but only the wealthiest gamers need apply.
KEYSPECS
28nmdie•768streamprocessors•980MHzcore clock•1,032MHzboostclock•2.5billiontransistors •2GBGDDR5RAM•192-bitmemorybus•243x 111x38mm(WDH)
DualRadeonHD7970cores•28nmdie•4,096 streamprocessors•1,000MHzcoreclock•8.6 billiontransistors•6GBGDDR5RAM•2x384-bit memorybus•306x98x39mm(WDH)
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