System setup and notes
AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB specs |
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GPU Comparisons |
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| Graphics Card | GPU Clock (MHz) |
Stream Processors |
Shader Clock (MHz) |
Memory Clock (MHz) |
Memory Bus (bits) |
Graphics Driver | Approx Price | |
| AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB | 950/1,000 | 2,048 x 2 | 950/1,000 | 6,000 | 384 x 2 | Catalyst 13.5 beta 2 | £850+ | |
| AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz 3GB | 1,000 (1,050) | 2,048 | 1,000 (1,050) | 6,000 | 384 | Catalyst 13.2 beta 6 | £350 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN 6GB | 837 (876) | 2,688 | 837 (876) | 6,008 | 384 | GeForce 314.09 | £850 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 4GB | 915 (1,019) | 3,072 | 915 (1,019) | 6,008 | 256 x 2 | GeForce 320.00 | £800 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2GB | 1,006 (1,058) | 1,536 | 1,006 (1,058) | 6,008 | 256 | GeForce 314.07 | £360 | |
HEXUS High-End Test Bench |
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| Processor | Intel Core i7-3770K (3.50GHz, 8MB cache, quad-core) | |||||||||||
| CPU Cooler | Intel reference E97378-001 | |||||||||||
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP4 TH | |||||||||||
| Memory | 8GB G.Skill RipJaws (2x4GB) DDR3 @ 1,600MHz | |||||||||||
| Power Supply | Corsair AX750W | |||||||||||
| Storage Device | Samsung 830 Series 256GB SSD | |||||||||||
| Optical Drive | Generic 24x DVD-RW | |||||||||||
| Chassis | Corsair Graphite Series 600T | |||||||||||
| Monitor | Dell 3007FPW and 3x BenQ EW2430 | |||||||||||
| Operating system | Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit, SP1) | |||||||||||
Testing notes
We've tested the Radeon HD 7990 and GeForce GTX 690 on two beta drivers that are to be made public this week. Both drivers promise an extra dollop of performance over that available on current WHQL sets.
Getting a graphics review ready usually entails hours chained to a test system. This time around we had difficulty in obtaining solid numbers in 3DMark's Fire Strike test. Both dual-GPU cards produced hugely sub-par numbers that weren't remedied with an absolutely fresh and fully-updated install of Windows 7 64-bit. We've witnessed others have this problem and it seems to be specific to the Futuremark test; the two cards ran through the real-world gaming benchmarks just fine. As such we have not published the customary results from 3DMark until a fuller investigation can be done.
Understanding just how powerful these cards are, we have tested on a 30in monitor with a native resolution of 2,560x1,600 and then on three full-HD screens that provide an overall resolution of 5,760x1,080.
