AMD Radeon HD 6990 "Antilles" Video Card Review @ [H]

The use of the slower 5000MHz memory ICs from the 6950 will be sure to disappoint. When you're already paying more than twice the price of two 6970s, you'd like for the memory to be able to overclock as well on the 6990. Sadly, in the HardwareCanucks review they were unable to even hit 5500MHz stable, they had to settle for 5444.
 
$700 and the poor cooling solution makes this a pass for me. I'll wait to see what Nvidia has to offer, then get two 6950s instead if they fail to impress as well.
 
x3sphere said:
No they used 5870s on the 5970, speeds were just downclocked.
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Yes, you are correct.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2877/4

Also 700 is a pass for me. All Nvidia needs is to lower the 570 prices at this point to create a shitstorm for AMD. Or they can keep prices the same but start releasing 2gb 570s (so they stop choking to death at higher resolutions with AA). Probably won't happen though. That makes too much sense.

Is it just me or is anyone else slightly annoyed when there's blood in the water but the sharks don't feel like biting? It's like watching Animal Planet with the Lions and the Hyenas but they're frolicking together and you really just want to see the Lion murderface all the Hyenas.
 
Vagrant_Zero said:
Yes, you are correct.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2877/4

Also 700 is a pass for me. All Nvidia needs is to lower the 570 prices at this point to create a shitstorm for AMD. Or they can keep prices the same but start releasing 2gb 570s (so they stop choking to death at higher resolutions with AA). Probably won't happen though. That makes too much sense.

Is it just me or is anyone else slightly annoyed when there's blood in the water but the sharks don't feel like biting? It's like watching Animal Planet with the Lions and the Hyenas but they're frolicking together and you really just want to see the Lion murderface all the Hyenas.
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I'd say that that hypothetical scenario is far from the realm of possibility. Cayman is a 390mm^2 chip, while GF110 is ~530mm^2. Cayman uses a PCB that accommodates a 256 bit bus shared with the 6970, GF110 uses a PCB for a 320 bit bus that is unique to its product. Yields are known to be good enough on Cayman that 90%+ 6950 cards can unlock shaders. I'm not sure how good yields are on GF110, but they could be similarly good.

If either of the two companies were to be aggressive in slashing profit margins per unit in order to increase volume, I'd say AMD not only has the better hand, but is currently executing that strategy more effectively with the ~$250 6950 > 6970 cards that are all over the place.

IDK, my $0.02.

EDIT: I couldn't figure memory costs into the cost to manufacture, I don't know about memory prices for high-density GDDR5 or the fancy-schmancy stuff being used on the 570 and 6950.
 
xorbe said:
Throwing the bios switch to position #1 is saved for another day?
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That was my reaction too. Switch in #1 position with no extra OC should be the "default" setting for performance tests.

I see no reason for any buyer of this card to knowingly leave it at the #2 position. The only reason for actually using it should be to restore the second BIOS after a failed OC.
 
Arthur Hucksake said:
Wise choice.
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That's_Corporate said:
Wise move, even before the 6990 came out :)
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Yeah, I learned my leason from the 5850/70 launch. The 5850 was the best value by far, but I bought the 5870. I could have CF the 5850s at a much cheaper price.
So I passed on the 6970 and bought the 6950 this time around, bam, it was able to be flashed to 6970 like performance.
The 6950 stock is equal to a GTX 480, two of them OC'd is more than enough to run any hardcore setup, just short of extreme.

With AMD, buy the second fastest card, you can't lose.
 
i am one of those that has had a 5970 for over a year... truly an amazing card!
Will most definitely be getting the 6990 for two reasons:

1. ATI/AMD crossfire support 'built-in' with superior graphic quality, improved tesselation, and acceptable TDP.
2. nVidia 590 will be THE BEAST... but will require SLI support (in game), high TDP, and LOADS of heat.

For a micro ATX setup single card setup the 6990 is THE choice!
 
Sounds like a good implementation so hopefully it has less potential problems than the 5970.
 
I wonder what it is about Frostbite that AMD cards dont seem to match closely with Nvidia?
 
It's about what we could expect, not sensible, but an impressive feat of engineering.

Yakk said:
What is interesting is the almost 200 watts less than the SLI 580's, and it's competitive in terms of performance. What type of power is the 590 going to draw, and what kind of engineering will be done to cool a 590 (besides water)?
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Considering that power draw will be the limiting factor they're quite handicapped in this battle. They could produce a triple-slot card and disregard PCI specs, but I doubt they saw the OC thing coming. Has a tiny switch doomed nVidia's hopes for a new performance flagship? We shall see.

BETA. said:
Man, I am just hoping this will affect 580 prices. But it will probably most likely only affect 570 prices.
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It certainly will... $500 is too much for a GTX580 when $700 gets you an HD6990.
 
Stupac said:
good review.

I was looking at some of benches from Anand and it was surprising seeing the 6950 CF beat the 6990 in quite a few games. Alot of them they were neck and neck.

The 6990 seems more comparable to 6950 CF rather than 6970 CF.
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Remember that canned benchmarks do not always equate to real world gaming. That being the proven reason we do not evaluate cards' performances with those.
 
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Yeah. AMD is all wrong on this one. Silver award sounds right on the money. This card should have been $599 all day long. That price just makes sense. God, now I know I am going to buy a 2nd 6970 for sure. I seriously thought about getting the 6990 if it was around $600 and selling my 6970. Not anymore.
 
SixFootDuo said:
Yeah. AMD is all wrong on this one. Silver award sounds right on the money. This card should have been $599 all day long. That price just makes sense. God, now I know I am going to buy a 2nd 6970 for sure. I seriously thought about getting the 6990 if it was around $600 and selling my 6970. Not anymore.
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It's possible we'll get there shortly. I've yet to see cards in retail but if the MSRP was $599 we'd probably still be seeing cards in the $699 bracket as e-tailers love to gouge those early adopters.

I think once the GTX590 hits, or maybe before, we may see a shift in prices. The 580 is wayy to expensive @ $500 in my opinion. I just don't think it's possible for Nvidia to squeeze two full fledged 580's onto a single PCB so we're probably looking more at a 570/580 hybrid like the GTX275 was. If that is the case, performance should be very similar and I don't see this card being more expensive than the 6990.

I'm waiting for nvidia's release and then I'll make my decision.
 
At least when you add the price saving from fewer waterblocks its not as bad.

Thank you [H] for doing an eyefinity review.
With these kinds of cards there isn't much point in single screen comparisons.
 
Stupac said:
good review.

I was looking at some of benches from Anand and it was surprising seeing the 6950 CF beat the 6990 in quite a few games. Alot of them they were neck and neck.

The 6990 seems more comparable to 6950 CF rather than 6970 CF.
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the low settings anandtech uses doesn't help either.. 2560x1600 max settings 4x AA.. a single gtx 580 and 6970 can pretty much do that in their sleep with the games they test let alone 2 gtx 580's and 2 6970 or a 6990 with those settings.


as much as 700 dollars sounds way over priced. theres no competition for the card other then 2 gtx 580's that are insanely over priced. i don't think the 700 dollar MSRP price tag will stick around much longer unless nvidia prices the gtx 590 even higher then that. i'll take a wild guess the MSRP will drop to around 625-650 once the 590 is released which is where it should be priced in my opinion. even 600 dollars is probably a too good to be true price for what you are getting. if the clocks were the same as the 6950 and it didn't have the bios/OC switch then i could see the 600 dollar price tag being warranted.
 
Great review. I will be interested in seeing how much difference running two of these in 8x/8x vs 16x/16x will be. I have been surprised before by how little a difference the 8 vs 16 slots are for actually performance, have we finally reached a point that 8x wont deliver enough bandwidth and dual 6990s aren't practical on 8x/8x mobos?
 
I'm liking this review alot. Very nice to see triple display reviews.:D
Looking at the current 580 prices, there are a few with rebates now, that push the price down to $480-490......still pretty expensive! Maybe this 6990 will have some influence on that.

Only one question.....if you have three monitors, all DP capable, will the included miniDP adapters allow you to do EyeFinity using all DP? or if I read this correctly, you would have to use the on-card DVI, one miniDP>DP and one miniDP>DVI (Single-link), right?

Lastly, where does one get a 1.2 DP hub?
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
the low settings anandtech uses doesn't help either.. 2560x1600 max settings 4x AA.. a single gtx 580 and 6970 can pretty much do that in their sleep with the games they test let alone 2 gtx 580's and 2 6970 or a 6990 with those settings.


as much as 700 dollars sounds way over priced. theres no competition for the card other then 2 gtx 580's that are insanely over priced. i don't think the 700 dollar MSRP price tag will stick around much longer unless nvidia prices the gtx 590 even higher then that. i'll take a wild guess the MSRP will drop to around 625-650 once the 590 is released which is where it should be priced in my opinion. even 600 dollars is probably a too good to be true price for what you are getting. if the clocks were the same as the 6950 and it didn't have the bios/OC switch then i could see the 600 dollar price tag being warranted.
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I think you just nailed it. My belief is that ATI is deliberately overpricing these video cards at $700 so that they have somewhere to go. They know that nVidia is going to be offering their own setup soon, possibly based on dual 560's or 570's. Since the bar has been raised with this dual bios solution, it is possible that nVidia will go even more outrageous than this. What better way to make a little margin from the "I gotta have it first" crowd and then have a tool for spoiling their competitor's launch into the dual GPU video card arena!

The other thing is that I think ATI knows that supply may likely be tight for a while, and what better way to keep the extra margins for yourself instead of letting a retailer mark it up beyond MSRP!
 
Good review guys. I am not thrilled about all the hot air being pump back into the case. Most of the cases pull air from the front which will not work very well with this card. Overall, it looks that 6990 will raise ambient temps to higher level than 2 x 6970 solution.
 
that was a great review, but....

you know there must be another article in the works. there was no overclocking, or use of the other bios at all. can it hit 1ghz???
 
You know F1 is game that is usually dominated by AMD. When they had issues getting it to run and AMD send the Hard ocp crew an update to fix it. Those type of things scare me away from AMD. I think issues like this keep me green.
 
magoo said:
Only one question.....if you have three monitors, all DP capable, will the included miniDP adapters allow you to do EyeFinity using all DP? or if I read this correctly, you would have to use the on-card DVI, one miniDP>DP and one miniDP>DVI (Single-link), right?
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You could also use all DP. You can use a dual-link DVI adapter but you'd have to buy it yourself.

Lastly, where does one get a 1.2 DP hub?
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Not found one yet. Dell makes a DP 1.1 hub (to SingleLink DVI).
 
martinje said:
You know F1 is game that is usually dominated by AMD. When they had issues getting it to run and AMD send the Hard ocp crew an update to fix it. Those type of things scare me away from AMD. I think issues like this keep me green.
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If that update to the CAP is only available to just HardOCP, then we have a serious problem. However that update isn't just available to them, as it is/will be available to everyone. The fact that HardOCP found a problem and ATI immediately went to work to correct it shows you how dedicated ATI is to make sure this new launch goes off perfectly.

tricky0502 said:
that was a great review, but....

you know there must be another article in the works. there was no overclocking, or use of the other bios at all. can it hit 1ghz???
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I was skimming the earlier replies, and I think I read Brent saying that they were time constrained for this article, and that they would be looking at the bios switch along with OC'ing later.
 
Looks like cfxd 6970s is the way to go unless u wanna go quad cfx but im not sure that scales as well as SLI
 
nice review as always
i had put the price at $649-699 so i was half right i guess. to me it makes more sense to go with 6970cfx vs a 6990 particularly in light of 6990's design that exhausts hot air inside case, 6970cfx should also give more headroom for OCing viz temps
thanks for the review guys
 
amdgamer said:
If that update to the CAP is only available to just HardOCP, then we have a serious problem. However that update isn't just available to them, as it is/will be available to everyone. The fact that HardOCP found a problem and ATI immediately went to work to correct it shows you how dedicated ATI is to make sure this new launch goes off perfectly.
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That could be because this card is being tested and know everyone is reading on it, on another review, they had flashing menus in Lost plant 2.

What will happen when when people dont play the game as much, my brother in law who loves to play Borderlands, had to stick to 10.4 because the game would crash @ random unless if he dissabled CFX on his 5970. Last time we spoke I believe we where up too 11.1A or so, he was still using 10.4.

I kinda feel guilty because he came and asked for my advice, and said yeah 5970 is a good buy. Now i feel guilty because I should have done more research before I said sure go ahead and buy it.
 
MSRP isn't that bad considering the fact that most cards never sell at that price. Still, we'll have to wait for the 590 to launch I guess. Is that a week away now?
 
martinje said:
That could be because this card is being tested and know everyone is reading on it, on another review, they had flashing menus in Lost plant 2.

What will happen when when people dont play the game as much, my brother in law who loves to play Borderlands, had to stick to 10.4 because the game would crash @ random unless if he dissabled CFX on his 5970. Last time we spoke I believe we where up too 11.1A or so, he was still using 10.4.

I kinda feel guilty because he came and asked for my advice, and said yeah 5970 is a good buy. Now i feel guilty because I should have done more research before I said sure go ahead and buy it.
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I've never heard of that problem, but dual GPU video cards are definately NOT for casual gamers. When he installed the new drivers, did he make sure to follow these steps?

Remove the drivers using the Catalyst uninstaller
Boot into safe mode and wipe all drivers using DriverSweeper
Boot into normal mode and install new drivers
 
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