Wednesday, January 26, 2011

AMD Radeon HD 6990 graphics card pictured

AMD's much anticipated Radeon HD 6990 made a brief public appearance this weekend in a demo by the company's graphics team manager Matt Skynner. The executive whipped out the card while discussing the company's APU technology, and while no actual details were revealed of the product itself, Japanese site 4gamer managed to get some close up shots of the massive dual-GPU card as well as a few details from reps at the event.




The card in question had one 8-pin and one 6-pin PCIe power connector, one CrossFireX connector for dual-card configurations, and one DVI port alonside four mini DisplayPort outputs. The card is also equipped with a backplate to help with heat dissipation, backed by a fan located directly in the middle and reportedly also a vapor chamber cooling system. It's worth noting that this isn't a production model, so we could still see some minor changes, specifically with the display output port configuration and probably the PCIe power connectors as well.




In terms of performance, if previous leaks are legitimate, the graphics card will integrate 3840 stream processors and have 4GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4.80GHz. That's a significant leap from the previous-generation Radeon HD 5970's 3,200 stream processors and 2GB of RAM. Pricing info is not yet known but it's likely the Radeon HD 6990 will go over $500, which is the price tag of Nvidia's flagship card, the single-GPU GeForce GTX 580.