HD 6990 and GTX 590 are very close in performance sits in a position where it is hard to name a real winner. ASUS intended to change that with MARS II, but PowerColor has its own concept solution coming to counter the threat from ASUS.
We reported on the first pictures of ASUS MARS II where the goal was the highest performing card where will get a GTX 590 with the same clock frequencies as GTX 580 together with big cooling and power consumption to match. PowerColor has its own design coming that instead uses circuits from AMD.
HD 6990 has clock frequencies very close to the one-armed battle ship HD 6970 and comes with 830 MHz and 880 MHz respectively, which is expected to increase to 880 MHz through the flick of a switch. Instead of increasing the clock frequencies to the same level as the flagship with one GPU, the new graphics card from PowerColor will come overclocked from factory.
The card has a custom design PCB that is shorter than HD 6990, but with one power supply for each GPU that is more powerful than one found in HD 6970. It has also changed the PLX that connects the GPUs to a chip from LucidLogix that allows you to choose betwen running internal CrossFire or through LucidLogix Hydra.
This card also has three 8-pin PCI-E power connectors and can be fed up to 525W according to the ATX standard. The cooler isn’t as beautiful as on ASUS MARS II, but also here we see a large amount of tightly packed aluminum heatsink with an unknown number of heatpipes. The card comes with one 140mm and one 120mm fan for cooling, and the video outputes consists of two DVI, two mini-DisplayPort and one HDMI.
When the card is intended to alunch we don’t know, but it’s not the first time PowerColor shows a monstrous design with 2 GPUs that never reached the market and considering this one looks like an early prototype we still have our doubts about this.
Source: TechPowerUp!
