AMD Teases Official HD 7990 Dual GPU Video Card

Updated: April 2, 2013

This year, at the Gaming Developers Conference, many products were introduced that should make gaming more robust, including one from the folks over at AMD. Once before we had heard of a new high-end dominator from the folks in red and black, but the idea spread like wildfire and burned out almost as fast when the product never saw the light of day. Now once again we see AMD teasing us again with news of an actual AMP approved and developed 7990 that should actually come into play as a real product.

In mid 2012, players like PowerColor and ASUS released what is officially unofficial versions of the 7990, but now AMD is allowing Multi-GPU Tahiti designed cards and letting companies officially call the cards the HD 7990. So basically even though non-AMD blessed 7990s have been around for half a year, only now is AMD giving their blessing to manufacture the cards. Essentially it’s just this: now that AMD has figured out just what in the hell their doing they will change their status from their officially unofficial to one of just official.

As far as real actual specs go AMD has still withheld that tidbit from the masses, but we can gleam a few things just by seeing the pics they have provided as their teaser. From the pics you can see right off the bat that the card is a completely open-air cooler unlike the blower cooling we have traditionally seen on many of their cards. Open air coolers have the ability to be better performers than their blower counterparts, but it takes a case with good air-flow to make the cooling work properly. This type of cooling actually heavily depends on your systems internal air-flow and could prove to be a Achilles heel if used in a system with poor air circulation.

You can also clearly see 2 8-Pin power connectors also present, which in turn means that the power is at or under 375W. AMD has been known to only ship cards with the right connectivity to pull their rated power at stock and this means that if they are holding on to that there will be a limit to the TDP at stock speeds. This would also be much lower than the TDP of the unofficial versions of the cards that require almost 500W of power, but those cards are also designed to be highly tweaked and overclocked for the enthusiast end user. If you look closely you can see the edge of the VRM circuitry and its Volterra “C” is just visible and this suggests that they are using a Volterra multi-phase inductor. The company Volterra is rumored to be one of the absolute best manufactures of VRM circuitry and it seems AMD is upping the Ante again as they have used this type of VRM before.

For AMD this may seem like a bit of a late start as this has already been semi-released before just albeit not officially as the GTX 690 has been out a year. The thing is, did AMD plan this all along or is this a severe screw-up by the folks in Red and Black? With Tahiti selling so well maybe AMD just felt it was a good time to kick back and let the pieces fall where they may. AMD has not as of yet released the actual specs, but we can assume it will be very close to what we have seen thus far as the ASUS and PowerColor cards although unofficial were still know by AMD and made somewhat to their design spec. For now we will just have to hold on to our hats and see how much the new cards will vary from what we have seen so far. If AMD can pull a rabbit from their hat and make a card that is faster than the GTX690 regardless of release date if NVIDIA does not come up with a counter punch AMD may find themselves in a fashionable position. For now though all we can do is wait and see what unfolds. My big question to the fans is this: Do you think AMD has waited too long to do an actual release, or do you feel this is perfect timing? Let us know your thoughts on the comments below and thanks for reading here on Tech Of Tomorrow.

Source: Anandtech