We’ve seen partner-made AMD Radeon HD 7990 cards before, and even had a couple of them in HEXUS labs for reviews (Club 3D and PowerColor varieties). However at the Games Developer Conference (GDC), currently taking place in San Francisco, AMD has shown off an in-house reference design which it claims will be both the “world’s fastest graphics card” and “whisper quiet”.
The reference AMD HD 7990 that was just shown off at GDC was mentioned briefly at the recent CeBIT trade show. AMD remained tight lipped over specs at GDC so we didn’t learn very many meaty details about the new card. However we did at least did get to see it shown off properly on stage and on some AMD presentation slides from which we could garner a bit more information.
At the presentation Matt Skynner, general manager of AMD’s graphics business unit said that the AMD Radeon HD 7990 would be the “world’s fastest graphics card” and with its specially designed three fan cooler, would deliver “whisper quiet” performance. It was confirmed that, like the partner designs, it is based upon “two series-7900 GPUs on a single card”. From inspecting AMD’s images we can see that this is a two slot design where the rather loud Club 3D and PowerColor designs both used three expansion slots. Another partner made solution, the ASUS’s Ares II card featuring two overclocked AMD HD 7970 GPUs, managed to fit into two slots but came with an elaborate water cooling setup.
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Power consumption appears to be reduced on AMD’s reference design as only two 8-pin power connectors appear to be present. Quieter and less power hungry is an appealing combination. Also from observing the card imagery we can see that the reference design offers a single DVI port and a selection of mini HDMI and mini DisplayPort connections.
Hopefully hand-in-hand with this dual GPU reference card development, AMD will be spurred to work on improvements upon its CrossFire driver performance, which can be hit and miss depending upon the game in question.
