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Release date for 6990?

K

kcjay

n00b
Joined
Dec 9, 2006
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I tried searching on here and google with no luck. Is there any definite release date for the 6990s?

I'm looking at building a new box when sandy comes out and I'd like to be able to play games at/near max settings at 2560 x 1440 so I'm trying to decide between 2x 6950, 2 x 6970 or 6990.
 
No definite release date. Just rumors. The rumors peg Q1 2011 which of course means anytime from 6 days to roughly 96 days. I'd estimate at least a month but not necessarily a lot longer than a month. Clearly, the 6970 boards/chips are out there, working and in the wild.

Slapping two on the same board doesn't seem like a huge-stretch further if that was already/previous in the design and the thermals of either chip seperately are decent...mind you the 580 has been out for a good two months and we haven't seen the rumored dual 580 chip board either.
 
2560x1440 wount really require a 6990.. I have very little problems doing 2560x1600 on a single 5870.
 
It seems like my video card upgrade cycle has gone down from every ~12 months to what seems to be ~6 months now. Right now, I'm itching to pull the trigger on either a pair of GTX 570's or 6970's...but the 6990 or Nvidia's solution has forced me to wait just a little bit longer.
 
SolidSnake3035 said:
So is it confirmed that the 6990 is going to be a dual chip card? If so I might have to settle for a 6970.
Click to expand...

Thats basically the point of it. The HD 6970 and 50 and the single cards and the 6990 is the dual GPU. GTX 595 should be coming out soon after/before also.
 
SolidSnake3035 said:
So is it confirmed that the 6990 is going to be a dual chip card? If so I might have to settle for a 6970.
Click to expand...

From the AMD slides (or was it cell phone camera screenshot) that were posted a few weeks back showed the 6990 to be a dual GPU videocard.
 
i think they are looking at a february launch for the 6990 but i know they also said it depends on the demand for the 6970. if the demands high they will push the 6990 back, if the 6970 sales arent as good then they will launch it on time. mostly to control resources so that the 6970 production isnt slowed down.

solidsnake, try it before you knock it. on video it looks like shit and is annoying. in person you forget the bezels are there after about 10-15 minutes.
 
The HD6990's going to be expensive and quite power-hungry. Unless you need the space or want two for quadCF, I'd say go with two single-GPU cards rather than the dual-GPU single card. It's quieter and most likely cheaper too. Plus you can buy the cards now, rather than having to wait until about February.
 
samuelmorris said:
The HD6990's going to be expensive and quite power-hungry. Unless you need the space or want two for quadCF, I'd say go with two single-GPU cards rather than the dual-GPU single card. It's quieter and most likely cheaper too. Plus you can buy the cards now, rather than having to wait until about February.
Click to expand...
If the 6990 ends up similar to 6950 CF (the 5970 was similar to 5850 CF) then it will probably be cheaper than the 5970 ($599) and use less power.
 
The HD5970 was $499, but it's now EOL, so you'll struggle to find one at a reasonable price new I suspect.
If the HD6990 is a 6950CF card, which seems plausible, it's going to have to be downclocked to fit within a 300W TDP envelope, or it's going to have to come with powertune turned down by default. Two HD6950s from the results I read equals about 340W. With HD6950s at $300, I'd expect an HD6990 [if it is two unmodified 6950s] to be maybe $650, it won't be a cheap card. That places it at both more expensive and more power-hungry than an HD5970.
However, it'll probably scale as well as the regular HD6900 cards, which means it'll work out at least 30% faster.
 
samuelmorris said:
I'd expect an HD6990 [if it is two unmodified 6950s] to be maybe $650
Click to expand...
wat.
$599 maximum, it's pretty much required to be the same price (or cheaper) than the two CrossFire cards its competing with. Dual 6950's would be $299x2, there's no reason to pay more for a 6990, which presumably offers less performance.

Following the exact trend of the 5850 ($299 5850 -> $599 5970).
Power might be slightly higher, according to benchmarks comparing the 6950 to the 5850. If they end up clocking it lower, the price will go lower than $599.
 
It will probably go for $599 MSRP. Unless AMD wants to put extreme price pressure on Nvidia and prices it at $549.
 
the 6990 will be just like the 5970 with it being 2 full 6970 GPU's downclocked to stay under the 300w limit and have voltage controls to allow you to overclock it and take it over the 300w limit. the question will be if they use another 400w PCB like the 5970 or use one that supports even more power then that.

for them to claim its PCIe 2.0 compliant it has to be within 300w but theres nothing about it saying the card cant be overclocked above 300w.

as far as it being power hungry, sure it may be power hungry for a single card, but were talking about dual 6970's on a single PCB here. so obviously its going to use roughly the same amount of power as CF 6970's when at 6970 clocks.

i think the price will be completely dependent on if nvidia actually releases the GTX 590 which should drive the price down on the 6990. if AMD beats them to the punch with the 6990 then it might be priced slightly higher til nvidia releases something to compete with it.
 
Performance should be nice regardless, with crossfire improvements and a flat 20% performance boost from each core. Still waiting for FAH OpenCL client though, I don't need something this powerful for gaming.
 
Nightbird said:
Performance should be nice regardless, with crossfire improvements and a flat 20% performance boost from each core. Still waiting for FAH OpenCL client though, I don't need something this powerful for gaming.
Click to expand...


yep I'm waiting for the openCL client as well. if it even remotely matches nvidia's PPD im grabbing 2 6990's even though i have no reason for either of them when it comes to gaming.
 
The GTX 590 or 595 will definitely not be 2x GTX 580. One should remember that the famous GTX 295 was actually 2x GTX 275 at GTX 260 clocks. I expect more along the line of 2x underclocked GTX 570.
 
omniscence said:
The GTX 590 or 595 will definitely not be 2x GTX 580. One should remember that the famous GTX 295 was actually 2x GTX 275 at GTX 260 clocks. I expect more along the line of 2x underclocked GTX 570.
Click to expand...

Yeah no way. The power requirement would be !!!
 
omniscence said:
The GTX 590 or 595 will definitely not be 2x GTX 580. One should remember that the famous GTX 295 was actually 2x GTX 275 at GTX 260 clocks. I expect more along the line of 2x underclocked GTX 570.
Click to expand...


well to be honest it was never really 2 gtx 275's because the gtx 275 never existed until well after the 295 was released. it was a hybrid design of the gtx 285 and gtx 260. which then nvidia decided to fill in the gap between the 260 216 core and 285. so walla the gtx 275 was created which was just half of a gtx 295.

which is most likely what the gtx 590 will be. except reversed this time. 2 gtx 570 GPU's with gtx 580 ram per gpu.
 
Something like this would not be good for PSUs like the HX1000w and most sub1KW multi-rail PSUs. No way to distribute load and you usually distribute that much power across two rails because you'd have two GPUs.

You could feed one 6-pin connector from each rail but that sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Never saw the point of this dual-GPU one-PCB Frankenstein ever since CF and/or SLI support became a standard feature of all gaming motherboards. Moreover, quad-fire is still useless with tri-fire not lagging far behind, not to mention the separate headaches of hybrid mode.

This kind of thing is an answer in search of a problem.
 
I'm hoping to see the 6990 and 590 or whatever it's going to be called soon. From everything I've read it's mostly just a matter of both teams doing everything they can to put out the most powerful card they can.

AMD had the single and dual chip performance crown before fermi. Now they've lost the single chip performance crown and I'm sure they'd like to keep the "worlds most powerful graphics card" title.

nvidia I'm sure is desperate to get the "worlds most powerful graphics card" title.

I'm sure some people are going to jump on me saying "well who cares about max performance when it's so hot/loud/power hungry. Performance/price is what is most important for most people and I'm not trying to argue any of that. If you're looking at $600+ dollar video cards you shouldn't really be worried about how much power it takes. I think amd and nvidia put out quality product and I'm excited to see what dual-chip cards they both offer.
 
A concern I have about the 6990 is that it will require too much power to equal a 6970x2.
6990 as a name could be inidictive of this.

The problem as I see it is the TDP of the card.

In the case of the 4870x2 the TDP for each individual 4870 was 160 watts. When you combine the two the result is less of course than a simple addition, but the result was that the 4870x2 had a TDP of 286.

The 5970 was two 5870s put together like the 4870x2, but it wasn't called the 5870x2 because ATI had to decrease the performance of the components to keep the TDP down. The 5870 has a TDP of about 188 watts, and the 5970 hangs out at about 300 watts.

Well, the TDP of the 6970 is 250 watts. So the coming 6990 is unlikely to be a 6970x2, and you should expect more noise and less performance than what you get from 6970 CF, IMO.
 
I expect they'll end up using two binned chips(for ultra low voltage) that are clocked like the 6950 but have full SIMD count. The 300w limit doesn't mean jack for this kind of card, as the PCI-Express label only matters to OEMs and you don't see many of those with this kind of hardware. At most, they'll just clock these even lower when at stock, but build the card with overclocking in mind just like the 5970.
 
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