Radeon HD 6990 review

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So it's time to have a closer look at the products. Below you can spot the reference Radeon HD 6990

Alright let's have a closer look at the Radeon HD 6990. This lengthy card is design (aesthetically) wise based and resembles the previous Radeon HD 6000 series products. Nice dark looks with the ATI red color embedded into the design.

Having two GPUs the cooler needs to be right. Sitting on top of each GPU is a cooling block and per GPU a radiator, in the middle the fan. The airflow will be taken in from the topside of the fan and the rear of the card, after which the hot air will be exhausted and dumped outside the PC.

Continuing with cooling, at the front side you can see that all monitor connectors have been placed as low as possible so that there is enough area on top to exhaust all that heat. The card comes with four Display Port 1.2 connectors and one dual-link DVI  connector. As stated you'll receive three converters for HDM and DVI amongst others. Once converted the DVI outputs will be single link, allowing monitor resolutions up-to 1920x1080 only.

We mentioned already that this card is lengthy, we measured it up and its 31cm / 12". That means it will fall out of spec for most mid sized chassis. Make sure that you have the space to install the card. A good thing though is that the power connectors are to be found at the top side of the card, giving you a little more headroom.

Also to your top right you can see a Crossfire connector, this card will allow you to get it doubled up, that's right ... you could place two into Crossfire mode and get four active GPUs rendering your games. Previous experiences however have shown that it's not a path you should follow as proper multi-GPU support is lacking really badly after 2-3 GPUs.

Here we can see the two 8-pin PCI PEG  power connectors positioned. Make sure you have a decent power supply, we recommend a 750W for a little reserve. Our test system would peak to just over 500W power consumption though this is with a slightly overclocked PC.