Sights on Titan: AMD Unleashes Dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 6GB

With NVIDIA having launched its Titan mega-GPU a couple of months ago, it seemed inevitable that AMD would finally get around to releasing its dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990, and as the title of this post and all of these pictures suggest, it’s happened. With the card comes renewed claims from AMD of offering the “World’s Fastest Graphics Card” – a claim that gets passed back and forth more than punches at a boxing match. What an apt comparison.

From a technical standpoint, AMD’s Radeon HD 7990 isn’t that interesting. It’s like most other dual-GPUs… it takes the specs of two single high-end GPUs and combines them together. In that regard, the HD 7990 is almost identical to having dual HD 7970s in CrossFire. At least in theory.

That said, to call this card a “monster” would be quite appropriate. 1000MHz clock, 1500MHz memory, 8.6 billion transistors, 6GB of GDDR5 (like NVIDIA’s Titan), 4096 stream processors, 8.2 TFLOPS of computational power, a $999 price tag and one heck of an ego from owning one.

AMD boasted good things when it launched its HD 6990 with regards to noise and cooling, but it has gone the extra mile with the HD 7990. Here, the company introduces a heatsink that spans the entirety of the card, and in lieu of the leaf-blower fans we saw on the 6990, axial fans have been adopted here – three in total. With this design, AMD promises noise-levels on par, or even under, a public library (37.8dBA vs. 40.0dBA, respectively).

With this GPU comes a couple of other niceties worth mentioning. There’s “Zerocore” power technology, where while at idle operation, the second GPU will reduce its power to zero – as you might have guessed. Another perk is the addition of an onboard PLX PCI Express chip that improves inter-GPU bandwidth, should you want to run two of these. Finally, the card features support for five monitors out-of-the-box, with 1x DVI port and 4x DisplayPort ports at the ready.

To help kick-start what’s sure to be a ridiculous amount of gaming after purchasing one of these, AMD is including vouchers for eight games with a purchase of its HD 7990. These include Far Cry 3 (our review), Far Cry: Blood Dragon, Crysis 3 (our review), BioShock: Infinite (our review), Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution (our review), Sleeping Dogs (our review) and Deus Ex: Human Revolution (our review).

You can expect AMD’s latest and greatest to hit etail within two weeks, and you can expect our review to occur within the next couple.