The AMD Radeon HD6990 has been released – and becomes the company's next generation flagship product and, for now, the fastest card on the market.
The HD6990 not only brings two Cayman XT GPUs squeezed on to a single board but also two BIOS chips – one standard and the over overclocked - allowing you to switch between the two at will.
However, that is tempered slightly by the fact that the company is only allowed to deliver a card that draws 375 watts – so to unleash the power and enable the second setting (and draw 450w) you'll have to contend with a scary sticker warning of the dire consequences.
Damages
"AMD's product warranty does not cover damages caused by overclocking, even when overclocking is enabled via AMD software and/or the Dual-BIOS Function on the AMD Radeon™ HD 6990," points out AMD.
It's not a warning that many enthusiasts are going to take too seriously, if you ask us, but invalidating your warranty for using an advertised feature is a little hard to take, although being given the option may be preferable for some.
The cooling is, as you would expect, fairly hefty to deal with the power of the card – and the reference design has dual vapour chambers and phase change TIM.
There's four miniDP ports and one DL-DVI – all in a line to help heat dissipation - and it will obviously make your game look mighty pretty too.
It will also make it run fast and run big, with those DisplayPort and DVI connectors offering some serious EyeFinity connectivity.
Five 30-inch panels in portrait running Dragon Age 2 anyone?
The twin GPUs running in the Radeon HD 6990 are effectively the same Cayman XT chips that power the Radeon HD 6970, but at stock speeds they both run at a slower 830MHz.
This means that a proper CrossFire setup running with two Radeon HD 6970s will beat it at normal speeds. And with a little BIOS tweaking magic, so could the Radeon HD 6950 reference design cards too.
That's to say nothing of Nvidia who is set to unleash its GeForce GTX 590 card on a very suspecting public very soon.
And there is a definite suspicion that AMD's biggest rival is waiting to see the final specs of this Radeon HD 6990 card before unleashing its own flagship offering.
Stay tuned for that...
In the mean time sit back and take a look at our in depth review of AMD's fastest ever graphics card.
