AMD Radeon HD 7990 review

Serious AMD engineering, but is it too late to the ultra-enthusiast party?

AMD Radeon HD 7990
AMD Radeon HD 7990

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Verdict

As effective as the cooling is, The AMD Radeon HD 7990 is never going to have the premium aesthetic of the GTX Titan. In graphics card terms, it looks like a super car - it's practically got alloys.

And if we take straight-line performance out of the equation and go for that experience angle, a multi-GPU card is never going to be able to compete against a simple, single-GPU card - especially one that's a little cheaper and only a bit slower in most cases.

Sadly, the HD 7990 is one of the flakiest cards we've tested in a long while. We were finally able to coax some impressive performance figures out of it, but only after a good long while of sometimes only having a single GPU turning up to the benchmarking party. This is no doubt down to the early drivers we've had to use for pre-release testing and not the hardware itself, but that's a plain reminder of the vagaries of multi-GPU gaming.

When you fire up a new game on your CrossFireX or SLI rig, you'll always be wondering whether one or other of your GPUs has gotten confused and wandered off somewhere else. As impressive a feat of engineering as this beast is, there are faster, smoother and cheaper graphics arrays available, and much better enthusiast experiences to be had elsewhere.