HD 6990 Preview/Review

[saaya]

All you're looking at is synthetic benchmarks - no one has put up any gaming results yet. Which is where this card should be making its presence count.

sorry, that doesnt make any sense... i guess im misunderstanding something?
it sounds like you have no idea what your talking about :P

your saying sli with two cards is faster than sli with one card in benchmarks, but in games sli with one card is faster than sli with two cards?
and why exactly would that be?
cause less bandwidth per gpu makes them... faster?

actually, according to guru3d. 2x6950 are louder then a single 6990.

which can be fixed easily

And the bottom card will be the only card running cooler, the top card will run noticeably warmer for obvious reasons.

which would be... bad case ventilation and using a board with poor pciE spacing?

If i did have the money to blow I'd get a 6990 because imo it will look cleaner in my rig then two cards with 4 power cables(more sleeving ugh)

again that can be fixed easily? youd rather spend money than properly route cables in your case and add some neat cables sleeves to them? :P

Exactly what I have been saying all along... previous dual GPU cards were at a significant discount compared to their CF counterparts so you had some reason to get them (5870CF was $800, 5970 was $600) but with 6990 this is not the case...

yeah, it should either be cheaper, or it should have an advantage over 6970s/6950s in xfire... it doesnt... at all... its a pure marketing/e-peen product... e-peen for people who wanna show off without actually knowing whats good and fast...

Well, is all "situational" really...

In my case I'm very limited (albeit by my own doing)

I have a micro-ATX board, and moving to ATX would involve changing case and modding/redoing the WC loop.

On the other hand the board's storage solutions are seriously crippled, the Marvell SATA III controller is less than stellar (even with "unofficially" update firmware and ROM) and the Intel RAID controller's ROM is grossly outdated and unusable with Sandforce drives, the manufacturer doesn't seem keen on releasing an updated BIOS (despite countless requests in the past three months) and it can't be "unofficially" updated because it doesn't support ROMs bigger than 64k.

So if I get one of these I can put an Areca controller on the other x16 slot, and chances are a single waterblock (however expensive it may be, as there won't be much demand and is going to be one either huge or complicated block due to the design of the board) is going to be cheaper than 2 x 6970 waterblocks.

For me on paper it looks an easier solution than changing computer case, board, board block(s) and modding/redoing the whole thing... And the money saved on those can be invested on the Areca controller, which will always perform better than the Intel RST and frees me from the tyranny of manufacturer's shoddy after-sales support...

So perhaps is a niche product, but not a purpose-less one...

why did you get an matx board if you demand top of the line quality and performance?