Review: AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB

Final thoughts and rating

AMD finally rolls into town with its own dual-GPU powerhouse of a card, the Radeon HD 7990. Sandwiching two GPUs that bear a very close resemblance to a Radeon HD 7970 GHz means there are no major surprises in what makes it tick.

The chip-maker has done a commendable job in getting a 375W TDP card to fit into a two-slot form factor and, crucially, kept its noise output and GPU temperatures at very reasonable levels.

Perhaps the only notable excursion from the norm rests with the video outputs, which use a dual-link DVI alongside four mini-DisplayPorts that enable five screens. AMD has a long-held belief that DisplayPort is the way forward for multi-monitor setups, though the lack of affordable DP-equipped monitors continues to be a concern. But hey, if you can afford an £850 graphics card...

Cutting to the chase, it's absolute performance that's most important for a card of this ilk. Our benchmarks show the AMD-produced Radeon HD 7990 to be, on average, about the same speed as a GeForce GTX 690 from NVIDIA. The term average can be misleading so we urge potential purchasers to look at the titles they're likely to play and decide on either dual-GPU behemoth on a case-by-case basis.

The Radeon doesn't do as well as the GeForce in the power-draw stakes - that's rarely a concern at this end of the market, mind - but the accompanying AMD Reloaded Never Settle bundle means that purchasers can avail themselves of eight top games if purchased from authorised retailers.

AMD's own Radeon HD 7990 6GB is the best interpretation yet of how to combine two premium Radeon GPUs onto a single PCB. A well-designed powerhouse of a card that gives as good as it gets from the very comparable NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690, the choice of which one to go for simply boils down to which brand you have more faith in: AMD or NVIDIA. If it was our money on the table we'd go with the slightly cheaper but performance-comparable GTX 690.

The Good

Good looks, well-built
The very pinnacle of single-card performance
Made for multi-monitor running
Impressive software bundle

The Bad

Performance scaling isn't great in some titles
HD 7990 has been done before
£850! Dios mio

HEXUS Rating

AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB

HEXUS Awards

AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB

HEXUS Where2Buy

The card will be available at the usual band of retailers from May 7th.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.