Powercolor HD 7990 Devil 13 6 GB

[WarEagleAU]

Actually I can say I am very impressed with this release from Powercolor, cooling mounting issues aside. It either competes very closely with the 690 or wins in most all benchmarks. Costs is still high and they should have worked on toning down power usage but hell who cares. This thing rocks. I didn't expect it to do so well. WtG. Not sure why most of you are calling it a loss or fail, I disagree respectfully with that. Major win.

 

[HumanSmoke]

Hexus received two review samples...both suffered from the same lack of pressure contact for the cooling that W1zz's sample exhibited.

Bizarre. Two weeks after W1zz appraised PowerColor of the issue, and PC are still sending out faulty review samples

 

[sammorris]

This isn't exactly an unknown.

I had the misfortune of testing two 4GB HD5970s from Sapphire when they were getting all the press attention. With the near-impossible task of getting hold of them you'd think that for such a small production run they'd take some care of their construction. Both the cards were DOA (and this was verified by CCL who provided a full refund), one seriously in that there was a strong burning smell as soon as the system was powered up.

I just can't get my head around why cards that are manufactured in such small quantities they are only really designed for the press and not the end-user aren't tested even briefly before they leave the factory, it's just bizarre.
I'm also not sure why the card should fail to work in dual-GPU mode in so many games that support crossfire perfectly well. Seemingly there just hasn't been any software groundwork carried out here either. Presumably Powercolor just released the card anyway, even though they couldn't get it to work properly, in hardware or software!

In fairness, they are no more deserving of criticism than Asus for botching the release versions of the GTX590 either, but these stories highlight the fact that when testing cutting edge hardware like this, if it's a fault-free experience, you're one of the lucky ones.

 

[mediasorcerer]

Well thankyou for the review, its quite the fascinating read, i dont see it as a fail, at least powercolor tried to bring to market something unusual and unique, if companies never innovated for fear of producing a lemon, where would we be for tech??

If it shows up in device manager as two gpu,s then surely you could disable one and run games that dont crossfire well in single gpu mode and still have plenty of performance yes?

Its a novelty card, no 1 makes you buy it.

Would you rather it was never made?, then you would not have had the pleasure of reading~posting in this review would you lol!!

I love the looks of it, its radiates-how do you say-wicked hehehe!

 

[sammorris]

Unfortunately that's not how dual-GPU cards work. There were workarounds you can use in catalyst control center to make the card behave as if the second GPU has been disabled, but after official support for this was removed, this is bordering on registry-hack territory. There is no 'enable/disable crossfire' as per two discrete cards.

 

[mediasorcerer]

Unfortunately that's not how dual-GPU cards work. There were workarounds you can use in catalyst control center to make the card behave as if the second GPU has been disabled, but after official support for this was removed, this is bordering on registry-hack territory. There is no 'enable/disable crossfire' as per two discrete cards.

Ok i see, i wasnt exactly sure, just guessing .

 

[sammorris]

Back in the days when I was using HD4870X2s you could disable Catalyst A.I. in the control center and that would as good as disable crossfire. Not quite the same and there were occasional times when that wouldn't suffice but in the majority of cases that would do the job. However, a couple of years back that feature was removed from the interface, and last I checked it hadn't been put back in, so you had to resort to modifying ini files / registry settings to achieve the same result. I don't think there was any technical reason for doing it, so it baffles me why the function was removed from the interface. Then again, I defy anyone to understand the reasonings of AMD's driver team.

 

[mediasorcerer]

Yes, they should get on the ball a bit more when it comes to drivers, mind tho, they got the 7 series of cards out pretty quick, personally, ive only ever owned amd cards, and never had driver issues myself, but ive never ran cf either.

It should be an option in ccc shouldnt it?.Perhaps i will join the amd forum and ask them to implement it?

 

[radrok]

If you want to get your second GPU disabled just go windowed full screen, that's how I do when scaling is negative

 

[sammorris]

Yes, they should get on the ball a bit more when it comes to drivers, mind tho, they got the 7 series of cards out pretty quick, personally, ive only ever owned amd cards, and never had driver issues myself, but ive never ran cf either.

It should be an option in ccc shouldnt it?.Perhaps i will join the amd forum and ask them to implement it?

Good luck with that
The AMD board is not usually monitored by staff working for AMD, and it can be hard work getting something useful out of the community there sometimes!

 

[zenlaserman]

I have a 4850X2 and the latest Catalyst that supports it (12.4). I've had the "Disable Crossfire X" option in every Catalyst I've run since I've had this card.

 

[sammorris]

The HD4850X2 is non standard and uses internal crossfire. Therefore you will have the option on it as crossfire was obviously not removed from catalyst. It is the catalyst AI setting as used by the 4870x2, 5970, 6990 and so on that was removed.

 

[Ren_kun]

If you did want to quadfire 2 devils... what kind of motherboard would one use? With enough room for a sound card?

 

[radrok]

If you did want to quadfire 2 devils... what kind of motherboard would one use? With enough room for a sound card?

I'd use a Rampage IV either extreme or formula, you'd be fine even with a Sabertooth X79.
You definitely want X79 chipset because I think 8x/8x won't cut it.

 

[eidairaman1]

I'd use a Rampage IV either extreme or formula, you'd be fine even with a Sabertooth X79.
You definitely want X79 chipset because I think 8x/8x won't cut it.

2 GPUs on the Same bus probably would strain at 8x/8x

 

[radrok]

Yeah it'd be 4x/4x/4x/4x, pretty choked lanes you'd have there

Z77 isn't good for 4 GPUs

 

[Rei86]

Doesn't this 7990 have its own built in PLX chip?

EDIT looked at the review and it indeed has its own PLX PCIe Bridge chip. So wouldn't it internally run at its max x16 and send out information on 7990 x 8 7990 x 8 when installed?