The Radeon HD 6990 (GPU codenamed Antilles) is made up of two Cayman XT GPUs (HD 6970) clocked at 830MHz (and not at 880MHz like a regular HD 6970) on a single PCB. A Cayman XT GPU has 1536 shader processors which means the HD 6990 has 2×1536 or 3072 SP. In the memory side, the HD 6990 comes with 4GB of GDDR5 memory (2GB per GPU) clocked at 1250MHz real speed (or 5000MHz effective).
The HD 6990 features two 8-pin power connectors. According to this article, the maximal power consumption of the board will be 2*150W + 75W = 375W.
During gaming, the power consumption of the HD 6990 (clocked at 830MHz) is around 350W while peak 3D (FurMark for example) is around 375W. But if HD 6990 GPUs are clocked at 880MHz (HD 6990 OC), the power consumption can jump up to 415W for typical gaming and 450W under FurMark!
The HD 6990 reference board will have a dual-BIOS switch:
- position 2 (default position): factory clocks (GPU @ 830MHz) and voltages (VDDC: 1.120V)
- position 1: overclocked GPU @ 880MHz and voltages (VDDC: 1.175V)
The Radeon HD 6990 will be launched on March 8th 2011.
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Not sure if AMD is doing the right thing here. So far they have been sensible in their power usage compared to the green camp but this just sounds wrong
Think m’y 5970 Will rock solid against this baby…
Mine
975 MHz / 1275 MHz / 3200 vec5 units
New 6990
880 mhz / 1250 MHz / 3072 vec4 units
And then 2gb gddr5 vs 4gb gddr5…
I agree, it’s getting ridiculous when the graphics cards uses about 50% of the power my cloth dryer uses. Even though this is a enthusiast card.
well I guess this card will open NVIDIA hand to do whatever they want with their GTX590
Awesome that they are not officially supporting the overclocked GPUs. That way they keep within PCIe limits for people with weak motherborads and PSUs, but make it easy for people to use the cards as they were designed for.
Most games wont hit those power limits though, unless you CPU is very fast. (Come on AMD release Bulldozer already!)