AMD has started sending out specifications and complete information on the new flagship Radeon HD 6990. Information that has been published verbatim by Donanimhaber and reveal jaw-dropping information on the overclocking mode where AMD’s new creation may consume as much as 450 watt.
AMD Radeon HD 6990 will sport dual Cayman XT GPUs for a total of 3072 stream processors. The two circuits operate at 830 MHz and connects to 4GB of memory through two 256-bit memory interfaces. With memory frequencies of 5 000 MHz this results in a crunching power of 5.1 TFLOPS and power consumption of 375 watt.
But AMD doesn’t settle for that but has given Radeon HD 6990 a so called overclocking mode where the dual BIOS circuits comes into play and a simple DIP switch can push up the clock frequencies to 880 MHz. With a voltage increase from 1.12V to 1.175V the maximal power consumption increases to almost ridiculously high 450 watt.
AMD says there is more to get and that you can reach frequencies of 900MHz GPU and 6000 MHz memory, this would move power consumption beyond 500 watt.
To make sure the graphics card doesn’t melt and die AMD has made sure its PowerTune technology monitors power consumption and raise or lower clock frequencies in realtime to reach optimal levels of performance.
AMD has also further developed its graphics card cooler that will now offer 20% better airflow than the previous version found on Radeon HD 5970. Beside a better airflow AMD has chosen a phase-changing cooling paste that will offer up to 8% better cooling than previous solutions.
AMD claims in its press material that Radeon HD 6990 is 67% faster NVIDIA’s current flagship GeForce GTX 580. How the comparison stands when NVIDIA launches GeForce GTX 590 with dual GF110 GPUs remains to be seen, but the first slap has been delivered and let the challenge commence as soon as possible.
