AMD Radeon HD 6990

AMD's Radeon HD 6990 was supposed to hit the market in time for Christmas 2010 but because the 6950 and 6970 cards were delayed to mid December, the 6990 too was put on hold until March.

The 6990 is the replacement to the 5970 and sports two Cayman 40nm GPUs mounted to a single PCB. Each GPU runs at a frequency of 830MHz while the card's 4GB of GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1,250MHz (5GHz effectively). The two GPUs work together via an internal CrossFire bridge.

Owing to its dual GPU setup the 6990 is a massive card (30cm in length) that simply won't fit into some ATX casings, so it's worth checking before investing in this card. To use the card you'll also need a heavy duty powersupply with a rating of at least 600-watts and with two 4-pin PCI-E power connectors. The card generates massive amounts of heat; we recorded a temperature of 89-degrees Celsius after running our Heaven v2.0 benchmark on the card for 15-minutes.

Running AMD's latest through our gauntlet, the card returned the fastest benchmarks we've ever seen from a single card. In our Heaven v2.0 test the Radeon HD 6990 produced figures of 131fps, 110.2fps and 100.2fps at 1,024 x 768, 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,200 pixels respectively. In comparison Zotac's GeForce GTX 580 AMP! Edition card managed figures of 76.8fps, 66.6fps and 62.6fps in the same tests.