Say hello to one of the world's fastest video cards, intended for the (seriously) hardcore gaming fiend (and nobody else).
Let's get this straight - this ASUS brute is probably not for you. Unless you're the rare kind of hardware fiend who refrigerates the liquid in your PC's water cooling kit or plays your games over four widescreen monitors at once, this speed demon is a serious case of overkill. It might be one of the fastest single-card, dual-GPU products currently available on the planet, but it's a demanding piece of hardware, and we're not just referring to your wallet.
Mounted snugly beneath the redesigned 12in long heatsink are two AMD VLIW4 GPUs, which are basically slightly underclocked 6970 GPUs. Each of these GPUs runs just 50MHz slower than the 6970, clocked at 830MHz. Together they utilise a slightly startling 4GB of onboard memory, more than many mainstream users have in their entire PC.
All of this silicon requires some serious juice, provided by two 8-pin power connectors and the PCI Express slot. All up, under load, this card sucks down a reactor-melting 375W - more than the PCI Express specifications officially allow. 300 of those Watts come from the power connectors, so you'll need a very healthy, high-end PSU to quench the 6990's thirst.
All of this energy has to go somewhere, and it's for this reason that AMD has totally redesigned the 6990's heatsink when compared to its last dual GPU broadside, the 5970. It now uses a centrally mounted fan to blow air over the two GPUs, and the new design can actually handle a load of up to 450W. Be warned though; most of this heat gets pumped directly into the interior of your case, making the Sahara look positively chilly. Suddenly those four case fans you mounted back in your case modding days don't look quite so silly.
If those power requirements haven't spooked you, the card even includes a special overclocking switch, referred to as the AUSUM switch (Antilles Unlocking Switch for Uber Mode). It's tucked away under a sticker; if removed to enable the switch, it also magically removes the card's warranty. True. A quick flick of the switch and the card's voltage and GPU speed increase slightly, increasing overall performance by around 5%, but sending the already high temperatures soaring.
Fans of Eyefinity mode will love the new mode supported by this card; it'll happily run five monitors in portrait mode. It does so courtesy of the single DL-DVI port and four mini-DP ports. It'll eventually be able to run six monitors in Eyefinity mode via these five ports, but only when MST hubs that can split the DP ports hit the market. ASUS has helpfully included two DP to DVI adaptors for those of us with older monitors.
Enough about the feature set though - what we really want to know is how fast this card performs. Unsurprisingly, it's like a greyhound on Red Bull.
3DMark wasn't too impressive, posting 23,834, just 10% faster than ASUS's previous heavyweight, the dual GPU ARES 5870. However, our S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat Free Benchmark shows what this card is capable of, doubling the performance of the ARES with an excel-breaking 278 frames per second. Enabling 8xAA and 16xAF should have slowed it down a bit, but it shed just 10 fps in the process, showing how much muscle this card has with all the eye candy enabled.
The rest of our results were slightly less eye-raising - H.A.W.X. (which favours NVIDIA cards) posted just 139 fps, around 50% slower than the GTX 570, while our other benchmarks showed this card between 10% and 70% faster than the ARES. It all comes down to whether the games are GPU limited or CPU limited.
To our amazement, the card didn't sound like a cyclone rushing inland; it's not even close to silent, but we've heard louder Crossfire and SLI setups before. And it's these setups that offer the real competition to this ASUS card. A high-end Crossfire or SLI bundle will probably be cheaper, not to mention faster, which leaves this card as a novelty for those with a passion for single card performance. Put two of them together though and ASUS could be on to something...
Available from ASUS, retailing for $969.APC rating: 7/10