Reviews - AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB

[HEXUS]

Bring on the beast.

Read more.

[hero1]

Late to the party. They shouldn't have released this card this late. Stuttering, coil whining, runt frames still plague this card and all AMD offerings. I stried XFX and Sapphire and I was totally disappointed even with XF. They need to address this issue if they want to attract enthusiasts back to their products.

That said, you guys need to start using FCAT like the rest of the sites to show the difference in reported and actual frames where this card suffers just like the 7970 CF setup did.

[darrensen]

At that price, defiantly a big NO! In desperate need of an upgrade (from 570) but i'll think i'll wait for Nvidia to make their move now. Shame, cos i was thinking of moving over to the reds.

[Deftee]

After seeing this, the rumours of the Nvidia 7xx series appearing at Computex sounds all the more appealing..

[OilSheikh]

Not any better than GTX690 then ?

[Tunnah]

paid 660 for a pair of GTX670s and I couldn't be happier. I just don't see the point in shelling out several hundred pound more for the pleasure of a single slot solution when people who put that sort of money into a system are gonna have an SLI/x-fire capaple mobo anyway.

[tumbledragon]

"Trouble is, DisplayPort hasn't caught on for the majority of cheaper full-HD monitors"

Who's spending a grand on a graphics card and running it on a cheap monitor?

[Willzzz]

No point if you are playing on one monitor, but buying three quality monitors is going to cost a lot more than the graphics card.

[Phage]

Late to the party. They shouldn't have released this card this late. Stuttering, coil whining, runt frames still plague this card and all AMD offerings. I stried XFX and Sapphire and I was totally disappointed even with XF. They need to address this issue if they want to attract enthusiasts back to their products.

That said, you guys need to start using FCAT like the rest of the sites to show the difference in reported and actual frames where this card suffers just like the 7970 CF setup did.

Funny...you loved the Club 3d version ?
"Now that's a beast. I like how it performs. So the ideal solution would be to buy 2 and watercool them and watch them go. Hey guys, can we have a sweepstakes for this card? I'd like to win one!"


Also I am unable to find the FCAT reviews that you say the other sites are using. Anandtech admits the problem and says it will use it in future. The cloest I can find is this one,
http://www.techspot.com/review/663-a...990/page3.html
which shows the 99th percentile frame time. Apparently the 7990 is not as good as the 690, but better than the CF 7970 and better than the 680.

The stuttering is a known issue for AMD, but the coil whine is not just limited to their cards, as a quick Google shows. Coil whine is a hardware thing and it's very hit and miss between manufacturers and cards.
I have to admit that I will be looking very closely at the next-gen releases from both companies for the smoothness of their delivery, rather than raw FPS.

[HalloweenJack]

take crisis 3 - same game used on different sites - vastly different set of results....

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7990/12.html

^^ 7990 leads

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphi...90-6gb/?page=5

^^ GTX 690 leads


http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/201...0-6gb-review/5

^^ 7990 and gtx 690 swap places (basically tied)

[Willzzz]

Also 99th percentile times, while better than nothing, are still quite a crude way to measure frame times.

[crossy]

The stuttering is a known issue for AMD, but the coil whine is not just limited to their cards, as a quick Google shows. Coil whine is a hardware thing and it's very hit and miss between manufacturers and cards.

Glad you said this, I was thinking that coil whine is down to poor quality control on the part of the manufacturer rather than anything intrinsically wrong. Or is AMD making these 7990's and folks are just rebadging (unlikely given the variety of 7990-based cards out there).

Got coil hiss on my rig - but wasn't able to narrow down whether it was in the PSU or the motherboard. Corsair support were adamant that it wasn't "their" PSU (and I don't have a spare to test with). Then again, it's not intrusive and only happens under certain circumstances so I'll grin and bear it.

[Willzzz]

It's probably different AA modes causes the changes in Crysis 3. Anandtech has the 690 ahead with FXAA.

IMO the techpowerup numbers are a bit silly because none of the cards are playable at 1600p or above at the settings they chose.

[HalloweenJack]

FXAA was also developed by NVidia - so its kinda obvious there own cards do better using it....

[kompukare]

Can't help think that AMD could have run this card at a lower voltage. They are meant to be binned chips after all and for 1GHz plenty of normal cards can do that with 1.0V or 1.05V.

W1zzard had a go at voltages and power consumption but left out undervolting:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7990/29.html

Computerbase had a go at the alpha of a driver meant to address microstutter etc:

Original: http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/g...90-im-test/13/

Google transliteration: http://translate.google.co.uk/transl...ed=0CDkQ7gEwAA

Works well in some games, but not so well in others.

Stuttering, coil whining, runt frames still plague this card and all AMD offerings. I stried XFX and Sapphire and I was totally disappointed even with XF. They need to address this issue if they want to attract enthusiasts back to their products.

Even? While XFX PSU are top notch (generally the cheapest way to get Seasonic), their graphic cards have a very poor reputation. Coil-whine is a mix of things though in that the PSU used can make a difference and the kind of load (low memory / high core etc. all can make a difference). Thing is, the 7xxx reference design are generally design more robustly than Kepler design in terms of VRM, phases etc. - which is kind of ironic considering how often Nvidia's design have failed in the past, but again Nvidia like to make profit.

So over-engineered Radeons should last longer than Kepler. Coil-whine is more of a nuisance rather than a longevity issue though.

[Terbinator]

FXAA was also developed by NVidia - so its kinda obvious there own cards do better using it....

More importantly its shader based - obviously something both cards have bags of in processing.