It has been a few months since these AMD Radeon HD 6990 graphics card initially launched. Since that time, a number of AMD's board partners have launched their own Radeon HD 6990 cards, though as is typically the case with these first wave of products based on a new GPU, they all conform to AMD's reference design, save for a water cooled card from PowerColor. While most of the Radeon HD 6990 cards on the market today are fundamentally very similar, we thought it would be a good idea to check out a retail version using the latest drivers to see how well the card performs with updated software. To that end, we got an HIS Radeon HD 6990 card and will see how things sake out in a handful of games. - HotHardware

HIS Radeon HD 6990 4GB Dual Graphics Card Review

In its default configuration these HIS Radeon HD 6990 has an 830MHz frequency with 5000MHz memory. There is 4GB of on-board frame buffer memory, meaning 2GB per GPU. There are a total of 3072 stream processors enabled across both GPU's, with 192 texture and 64 raster operating units. And if you add all of this up, what it amounts to is roughly twice of everything available on the reference Radeon HD 6970, save for the GPU clock. Having two high-end GPU's and 4GB of memory on-board obviously requires plenty of power to operate appropriately, so two supplemental 8-pin PCI Express power connectors are necessary.

We took this opportunity to test a retail HIS Radeon HD 6990 video card against NVIDIA's best using the latest drivers for both, and can safely say the landscape hasn't changed much in these last few months. The Radeon HD 6990 was the fastest card available when it launched, and it remains to be the fastest card today. These HIS Radeon HD 6990 in particular performs exactly as a reference card would, so by extension it is one of the fastest cards currently available. In the majority of the benchmarks we ran, the HIS Radeon HD 6990 took the top spot, with the GeForce GTX 590 trailing closely behind, and nothing more.

The HIS Radeon HD 6990 is an ultra powerful graphics card, that's sure to please any hardcore gamer. Consumers must know what they're getting into with a card like this though. For one, it's going to require a potent power supply to keep this card fed with plenty of juice. The Radeon HD 6990 is also a very large card, and it pumps out a good amount of heat, so adequate case cooling is also a must. Finally, the HIS Radeon HD 6990 does get quite loud under load. In addition to those aforementioned items, the HIS Radeon HD 6990 is going to set you back over $700, which is no small chunk of change and will not be for everyone.

Availability is limited too, finding these Radeon HD 6990 cards in stock is a bit of a chore at the moment. But if you've got the coins and understand the nature of the beast, the HIS Radeon HD 6990 is just a powerful graphics card which offers top notch performance.