What all that extra power gets you
Just a couple of weeks back AMD released the new Radeon HD 6990 4GB graphics card to world and it was easily crowned the king of the GPU world. With performance that beat out AMD’s own Radeon HD 5970 and walked past the single GPU based GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB from NVIDIA, the HD 6990 offered the most performance in the smallest space you could buy – and for a hefty $699 MSRP.
Just a couple of weeks back AMD released the new Radeon HD 6990 4GB graphics card to world and it was easily crowned the king of the GPU world. With performance that beat out AMD’s own Radeon HD 5970 and walked past the single GPU based GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB from NVIDIA, the HD 6990 offered the most performance in the smallest space you could buy – and for a hefty $699 MSRP.The Leftovers
Just a couple of weeks back AMD released the new Radeon HD 6990 4GB graphics card to world and it was easily crowned the king of the GPU world. With performance that beat out AMD’s own Radeon HD 5970 and walked past the single GPU based GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB from NVIDIA, the HD 6990 offered the most performance in the smallest space you could buy – and for a hefty $699 MSRP. (Note that they are selling for more than that as of today…)
One of the interesting features of the card was a unique hardware switch on the top of the card that is used to switch between standard clock rates of 830 MHz and a 375 watt power rating and a higher voltage, higher clock rate along with the ability to breach the 375 watt limit set by the PCI Express standard.
Along with the move from 830 MHz core clock to a 880 MHz core clock (which by itself wouldn’t really be notable), the HD 6990 cards move from a voltage of 1.175v stock to a slightly improved 1.2v for additional overclocking headroom. In conjunction with this, the PowerTune implementation (which uses hardware to limit maximum power consumption levels) gets tweaked to allow for more power consumption. This is good news for overclockers again.
Here is my quote from the original HD 6990 story:
Unfortunately, because of some time constraints, we didn’t get to play around with this overclocked setting originally but today, we rectify that situation.
In our story today you will see a collection of benchmarks, all run at the 2560×1600 resolution that actually stresses the HD 6990, comparing the default 830/1200 speeds to the automatically overclocked settings of 880/1250 that result from flipping that overclocking switch. Though I realize that not many users have 30-in displays with 2560×1600 screens, the higher pixel count should also represent performance scaling and changes on multi-display Eyefinity configurations.
After those tests, you will see our experiences with additional overclocking attempts through AMD’s Overdrive software in the Catalyst Control Center.
Our testing configuration was the same as all of our recent GPU articles:
- Testing Configuration
- ASUS P6X58D Premium Motherboard
- Intel Core i7-965 @ 3.33 GHz Processor
- 3 x 2GB Corsair DDR3-1333 MHz Memory
- Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB HDD
- Corsair Professional Series 1200w PSU
Something more important is
Something more important is that when searching for a good internet electronics retail outlet, look for web stores that are continuously updated, always keeping up-to-date with the newest products, the most effective deals, as well as helpful information on products. This will make certain you are getting through a shop that really stays atop the competition and gives you what you need to make educated, well-informed electronics acquisitions. Thanks for the critical tips I’ve learned from the blog.