Power, temps and noise
It's clear to see which of the five cards use dual GPUs. The GeForce GTX 690 can hardly be said to be frugal when sipping power, which is shown by a watt meter measuring the entire system, but the inherent difficultly of combining two top-tier Radeon HD 7970 GPUs onto one PCB is manifested by an extra 20 per cent juice being required.
That huge, huge cooler does its job and keeps the card at a reasonable 80°C when painting pretty pixels in Far Cry 3.
AMD mentioned to HEXUS that the HD 7990 had been built with acoustics very much in mind. Our PCE-318 noise meter shows it to be the loudest, but do understand this is all relative. The reported 43dB is actually pretty quiet, especially for such a beastie. And just as we found it hard to separate the two dual-GPU monsters in the gaming benchmarks, noise and temperature are near-identical, too.
