AMD Radeon HD 6990 Dual-GPU Graphics Card Unboxing

Although we don’t have a specific date to shoot out there, AMD will soon be launching its long-awaited Radeon HD 6990 dual-GPU graphics card, and as this is the company’s ultimate flagship product, it wanted to convey that message with pride. Our sample didn’t arrive in standard pink bubblewrap and shoved into a FedEX box like usual… no, this card came in its very own silver protective briefcase.

We’ve seen packaging like this before from certain vendors, but never from AMD itself. In talking to one of our reps at the company, we were told that this launch was special, and that it’d be a bit silly to ship the card in standard fare. Being that the GPU is AMD’s first dual-GPU offering for the HD 6000 series, we can at least agree that this launch is going to be super-interesting.

On the face of the briefcase is a large advertisement for Dragon Age II, which comes out on March 8. This did its job well of reminding me that I still haven’t played through the first one, to which I blame on the fact that there are just too many good games out there!

After opening the briefcase up, we’re greeted with the slogan, “Rise to power with the AMD Radeon HD 6990, the fastest graphics card in the world“. We can’t share performance data at the moment, but based on rumors, it’s roughly 2 x HD 6970… so it’s not hard to do the math.

The Radeon HD 6990 features an interesting reference cooler, because it utilizes just a single fan. There’s a GPU on either side of this fan, and due to the heatsink design, the heat is to be evenly dissipated across the entire card, and pushed out the back.

One thing to take note of is that this card includes a different set of display connectors in the back. Rather than two mini DisplayPorts, HDMI, and two DVI, this card includes one DVI and four mini-DisplayPorts. Don’t have a DP monitor? Don’t worry… AMD is making sure that all HD 6990s sold will include appropriate adapters in the box for all of the popular connector types.

Due to reasons we’ll tackle in our launch article, AMD urged us to not remove the card’s cooler for the sake of taking photos. Instead, the company provided us with what we needed, so you can see what’s under the hood:

(This picture has been removed as per the request of AMD, as the photo wasn’t meant to be originally distributed. We’ll re-show the picture for our launch article.)

What we can garner from this picture is creative placement of some voltage regulators (and possibly some of an improved design) and a rather clean layout overall. Rather than see a billion caps all over the place, most of the surface is clean, proving this to be a rather efficient design.

AMD is rather confident in the fact that the HD 6990 is going to become the next drool-worthy card, and it’s not being subtle about it. At the end of most press decks, companies generally have a “Thank You” page featuring a picture of their product, but not here. With this launch, it looks like we are meant to do the thanking, as AMD’s final page simply states, “You’re Welcome”. I admit… when I first saw this page, I was in tears laughing. Someone at AMD has a good sense of humor, it seems.

Our launch article for the Radeon HD 6990 will be coming soon, so stay tuned!