GoKawiil15 years ago, AMD released its powerful Radeon HD 6990 graphics card (review link). This flagship dual-GPU hot rod, codenamed Antilles, was several months late in March 2011 and poked its head out only a couple of weeks before Nvidia’s reply. Nevertheless, the dual-Cayman XT GPU board, with a majestic-for-the-era 4GB of VRAM, became the world’s fastest graphics card (though that was an honor AMD already held with the Radeon HD 5970 2GB). To reach this PC performance pinnacle, AMD perhaps pushed the silicon a little too hard, though, with reviews of the time complaining about heat, noise, and power consumption.
The specs and performance of the Radeon HD 6990 were spectacular to behold at the time. Two fully-fledged Cayman XT GPUs were shoehorned onto a single PCB and connected via AMD’s CrossFireX. Essentially delivering two HD 6970 graphics cards on one board, albeit slightly downclocked, the HD 6990 thus delivered:
Dual Cayman XT 40nm GPUs, packing 3072 stream processors and 5.28bn transistors combined
Standard GPU clock of 830 MHz, OC up to 880 MHz
4GB GDDR5 (2GB per GPU)
Five-display support
Massive 375 W TDP, with OC modes pushing 450W (dual BIOS switch innovation)
Dual-slot 12-inch PCB with two 8-pin connectors
Flagship pricing at $699
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