Review VTX3D AMD Radeon HD 6990 (Antilles): The Fastest Graphics You Can Get, for Now

The never ending rivalry between AMD (ATI) and NVIDIA reached a new level this March with the release of Radeon HD 6990, AMD’s best of the best, their “enthusiast flagship”. AMD released this double-GPU graphics card a while ago on March 8 to claim the title of the world’s fastest graphics card. Radeon HD 6990 itself had been the subject of rumors all over the internet prior to its official introduction.

Our HD 6990 sample came from VTX, a relatively young brand that is still unfamiliar to people’s ears here in Indonesia. In spite of that, they appear to have a rather bold marketing strategy which involves releasing enthusiast products such as this one into the market. Previously codenamed as “Antilles”, the Radeon HD 6990 is a prestigious product that should be able to increase awareness –or at least direct some attention- towards this certain brand.

In this article, we will explore the technology, features, and performance offered by the AMD Radeon HD 6990 and compare it to various competing graphics cards, including multi-GPU solutions (GTX 560 Ti and GTX 570 in SLI, and HD 6970 and HD 6950 in Crossfire). As usual, before moving on to those, let’s take a look at the specification table first.

Radeon HD 6990, Specification

	AMD Radeon HD 6990	AMD Radeon HD 6970	AMD Radeon HD 6950	AMD Radeon HD 6870
Codename	Antilles	Cayman XT	Cayman Pro	Barts XT
Fabrication Process	40 nm	40 nm	40 nm	40 nm
Transistors	2.64 Billion x2	2.64 Billion	2.64 Billion	1.7 Billion
Die Size	389 mm²	389 mm²	389 mm²	255 mm²
Core Clock	830 MHz	880 MHz	800 MHz	900 MHz
Stream Processors	1536 x2	1536	1408	1120
Texture Units	96 x2	96	88	56
ROPs	32 x2	32	32	32
Memory Type	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory Size	2 GB x2	2 GB	2 GB	1 GB
Memory Clock (effective)	5000 MHz	5500 MHz	5000 MHz	4200 MHz
Memory Interface	256-bit x2	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	11	11	11	11
Shader Model	5	5	5	5
Power Connectors	8-pin + 8-pin	8-pin + 6-pin	2x 6-pin	2x 6-pin
Min Recommended Power Supply	750 W	550 W	550 W	500 W
Bus Support	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16

For those who’ve been keeping an eye on the “Antilles” for some time, the Radeon HD 6990 should come as no surprise. ATI’s (AMD) habit of developing double-GPU cards can be traced back to the era of the Rage 128 (Fury Maxx) in early 2000. Today’s HD 6990 puts two Cayman XT (HD 6970) chips on the same PCB board. Their core and memory frequencies are slightly lowered. Our guess is that it’s needed to keep TDP down at a reasonable level. However, AMD provides one additional BIOS with an alternative, OC profile that could be activated to increase HD 6990’s operating clocks to match that of the HD 6970’s. With a total amount of 3072 shader processors, 192 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and 4 GB of on board memory, the technical specification sounds impressive.