AMD Radeon HD 7990 Reference Board Pictured, Specs Confirmed in GPU-Z Screenshot

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AMD Radeon HD 7990 Reference Board Pictured, Specs Confirmed in GPU-Z Screenshot

Admittedly, this is a terrible day for news on unannounced GPUs, but we rushed it in anyway. Here are the first board shots of AMD's next-generation dual-GPU graphics card, the Radeon HD 7990 (codename: "New Zealand"). Sources told us that AMD working overtime to release this SKU, to restore performance-leadership of the Radeon HD 7900 series. The dual-GPU card, according to the specifications at hand, is bearing AMD's coveted "GHz Edition" badge, its core is clocked higher than that of the HD 7970.

But first, the board shot. Pictured below is the first picture of this beast. Right away you'll question its authenticity for using a 70 mm fan instead of a lateral-flow blower, but that design change serves a purpose. Despite its high performance, the previous-generation Radeon HD 6990 was plagued with user complaints of high noise. That's because a single, normal-sized lateral-flow blower was positioned in the center, blowing through two sets of aluminum channels, at a very high speed. With the HD 7990, AMD on the other hand, borrowed the ventilation design of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 590, to a large extant. It reused the fan found on reference-design HD 7850 and HD 7770, and placed it in middle of two heatsinks.
The picture reveals the card to be fairly long. AMD chose a fancy PCB number to denote "leeeet" (elite), it did a similar word-play with "AUSUM", around the HD 6990. The card is using an AMD-rebadged PLX PEX8747 PCI-Express 3.0 48-lane bridge chip, which features "broadcast" features that makes it fit for dual-GPU graphics cards. Moving on to specifications, the HD 7990 features 1 GHz core clock speed, with 1250 MHz memory. The card has a total of 6 GB GDDR5 memory, 3 GB per GPU. It features completely-unlocked 28 nm "Tahiti XT" GPUs, with 2048 stream processors. It draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Display outputs include one dual-link DVI, four mini-DisplayPort connectors. Slated for a "hard-launch" on April 17, AMD's Radeon HD 7990 6 GB "New Zealand" will target a price-point of US $849.

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