AMD Radeon HD 7990 6 GB

[the54thvoid]

Why have so few comments picked up on the apparent 'rarity' of the card due to its highly binned chips? And what's more surprising is the lack of comments about the coil whine. It's disingenuous to call a card whisper quiet when it has coil whine louder than it's fan noise. It would be a waste putting a water block on that when all you'll get is a screaming pig in your pc. Knowing that alone would stop me buying one of these. Bad manufacturing.

 

[VulkanBros]

I have read other reviews - no mention of coil whine.
Maybe the review sample Wizz got is faulty ??

 

[W1zzard]

Why have so few comments picked up on the apparent 'rarity' of the card due to its highly binned chips? And what's more surprising is the lack of comments about the coil whine.

i'm wondering the same

I have read other reviews - no mention of coil whine.
Maybe the review sample Wizz got is faulty ??

i checked with five other reviewers and they all got it. i guess some are just focusing on something else

 

[Xzibit]

I have read other reviews - no mention of coil whine.
Maybe the review sample Wizz got is faulty ??

He broke it cause they didnt let him keep it.

He had to write about it in his review so he can have an aliby.

 

[W1zzard]

He broke it cause they didnt let him keep it.

He had to write about it in his review so he can have an aliby.

uhm .. no .. please dont troll my reviews and personal integrity

 

[dj-electric]

Welp^ Someone got their ass handed to them.
Thanks for thr review w1zz. Defo a skipper and not a keeper.

 

[DayKnight]

^ lol, looks like he did.

Anyway, excellent review, bad product.

Not impressed.

Plus, it's HUGE!.

 

[Nordic]

I had coil whine on my 7970 for the first week. It went away though. I thought coil whine went away over time so wouldn't it for this also? This is an honest question.

 

[W1zzard]

I had coil whine on my 7970 for the first week. It went away though. I thought coil whine went away over time so wouldn't it for this also? This is an honest question.

it was present out of the box, all the time, no matter which game was running, and didn't change over the course of my testing.

 

[the54thvoid]

I had coil whine on my 7970 for the first week. It went away though. I thought coil whine went away over time so wouldn't it for this also? This is an honest question.

In some cases it can but rarely. Both my cards had it to a mild degree. All gfx cards can get it remember - it just seems more common in the 79xx family for some reason.

 

[Nordic]

it was present out of the box, all the time, no matter which game was running, and didn't change over the course of my testing.

How long does your testing take?

 

[W1zzard]

In some cases it can but rarely. Both my cards had it to a mild degree. All gfx cards can get it remember - it just seems more common in the 79xx family for some reason.

I tried the card on 3 systems with different mobos and PSUs, all the same

 

[d1nky]

I like the fact it can be xfired with any Tahiti chip, just imagine having a 7950 and somehow coming across a 7990 for cheap one day

wow I just seen the scores in some games /

 

[Animalpak]

nice deeply detailed review !

AMD needs to stuck on the mainstream market and compete with his price/performance ratio.

Try to produce the fastest card on the planet is not their call they have very powerful GPU's but that even they know how to use fully.

 

[DayKnight]

Coil whine is the most annoying thing in my opinion!. Good thing I never had it with my stuff.

Heard it in some videos and I was pretty annoyed. Yes, AMD GPU's were present in those videos.

Don't think I can live with coil whine that dances to how much load is going through the GPU/device. It's like listing to some old game.

What is the point of having a silent PC when you will be listening to some annoying 'teeeeen' all the time?.

 

[W1zzard]

How long does your testing take?

The 6 days that I had it were enough to get all data for the review as you can see, plus some more time earlier this week to write text.

 

[the54thvoid]

Assuming the latency issue/non-issue gets fixed (the thing that doesn't bother everyone but does bother some but gets made worse by graphical visualisations) there is still the problem with poor crossfire support. Whether this is down to Nvidia being very nasty or just AMD being 'slow' I don't know (hedge my bets and say lazy developers on a Nvidia sponsored title not giving a hoot about AMD, or worse hobbling it intentionally).

AMD should focus more on getting the cards crossfire to work better in more scenarios. If we ignore latency (quite easy to do for many who it doesnt bother) it would be the spectre of having a $1000/£850 card that acts like one less than half the price in some popular games that would stop me from buying one. And the whine.

 

[Kaotik]

What's up with disabling TressFX? It's using standard DirectCompute and not limited to one manufacturer.

It's not like there hasn't been tons of games in the past and even in your current game lineup which work better than usual or worse than usual on one vendor with all the bells and whistles that have been still included in the tests.

edit:
And 680 moving from 4.7% slower to 2.5% faster than 7970GE with one driver just doesn't seem right at all

 

[W1zzard]

What's up with disabling TressFX? It's using standard DirectCompute and not limited to one manufacturer.

directcompute just runs a shader (that you can freely program and optimize for certain arch) and that puts the result in the cpu and not on the screen. kinda like using physx on cpu vs gpu and saying "it's using standard physx"

And 680 moving from 4.7% slower to 2.5% faster than 7970GE with one driver just doesn't seem right at all

i'm sure you can spot why, if you take a close look at the review. i wonder why people keep making accusactions without bringing any piece of data to the table

 

[madness777]

The 6 days that I had it were enough to get all data for the review as you can see, plus some more time earlier this week to write text.

W1zz, you're amazing! I admire people who put all their time into their work!

 

[Kaotik]

i'm sure you can spot why, if you take a close look at the review

That still doesn't answer the TressFX case - why was it disabled in "terms of fairness" when it's clear the game line up has other games which prefer one brand of cards over the other (when compared to average difference between cards) by up to nearly 60% difference?

edit:
Seems you edited the answer there - while it does involve CPU, it does major effect on what we see on the screen, too.
It's not limited to one manufacturer of GPUs like PhysX, either, and DirectCompute is used in various games these days.

 

[W1zzard]

That still doesn't answer the TressFX case - why was it disabled in "terms of fairness" when it's clear the game line up has other games which prefer one brand of cards over the other (when compared to average difference between cards) by up to nearly 60% difference?

maybe it's because when i played the game i liked lara better without tressfx. i'll look into this.

edit: details were set to "ultra", which doesn't include tressfx, and sets shadows to normal. i'll adjust on next rebench

 

[d1nky]

@wiz I seen the drivers used are 13.5 beta 2 for 7990 I take it you was sent these drivers?

theres some leaked drivers going round with apparent full support for the 7990 (http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183081), and amd have just announced that they have made a break through with frame latency.

did you attempt different drivers or was those ones used recommended or the best for that card?

 

[W1zzard]

@wiz I seen the drivers used are 13.5 beta 2 for 7990 I take it you was sent these drivers?

theres some leaked drivers going round with apparent full support for the 7990 (http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183081), and amd have just announced that they have made a break through with frame latency.

did you attempt different drivers or was those ones used recommended or the best for that card?

windows 8 only at the time, prototype, not recommended for performance testing.

amd says: "For this reason, I’d like you to resume / continue testing with 13.5beta2 for average frame rates and performance tests, and use this driver only to see the progress we’ve made in terms of frame times and frame pacing."

instead of spending a day installing windows 8 and games i rather wanted to bring you voltage control, which you can't read about in every other review

Edit: Just to clarify: AMD provided a Windows 7 compatible driver on Monday this week, but my card was picked up on Saturday morning the week before. I am sure that AMD will include these improvements in Vista/W7/W8 driver, possibly Windows XP, too.

 

[the54thvoid]

@wiz I seen the drivers used are 13.5 beta 2 for 7990 I take it you was sent these drivers?

theres some leaked drivers going round with apparent full support for the 7990 (http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=183081), and amd have just announced that they have made a break through with frame latency.

did you attempt different drivers or was those ones used recommended or the best for that card?

I've been doing the rounds on reviews, all the reviewers are stating the latency drivers are not due out till summer with most saying 2-3 months away at least. Also seems a lot of reviewers were shipped the alpha drivers after they had finished testing. Bit of a rush job tbh. Those that did test the alphas, only for a couple of games in general did report vastly reduced latency. Should add that the runt or partial frames have been eliminated in the process but that would also affect fps, though still be in the same playing field as the 690.