Introduction

AMD has been working on a dual-GPU HD 7990 card for a long time, but we are still waiting for a release. PowerColor has taken on the challenge and engineered a working HD 7990 by themselves, without any help from AMD.

The PowerColor Devil 13 is the company's flagship limited edition hardcore enthusiast card. It uses two Tahiti XT GPUs running at HD 7970 GPU speeds of 925 MHz GPU and 1375 MHz memory. To enable an extra clock boost, a turbo button has been added which takes the GPU clock to 1000 MHz.



Cooling for this immensely powerful card is provided by a custom triple slot, triple fan cooler which covers the whole card. Pricing of the PowerColor Devil 13 is $999, with limited volume available.


Important: All data in this review was obtained after I repaired a major design error of the card. When I received it, the card ran extremely high temperatures, reaching beyond 100°C, causing instability and black screen hangs. The fan would also run at 100% almost instantly. This is caused by screws with integrated stop that resulted in too little mounting pressure between GPU and heatsink, clearly an engineering oversight. I added three metal washers on each screw by removing the screws, adding the washers and putting the screws back. The cooler was removed for this procedure, and thermal paste was replaced with a thin layer. Only this procedure enabled the card to run stable. The card was unusable out of the box.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + documentation
• Active mini-DP to DVI adapter
• Passive mini-DP to DVI adapter
• Wiha screwdriver kit
• 3x PCI-Express power cable
• CrossFire bridge
• DVI adapter
• PowerColor powerjack

The Card

PowerColor's card looks mighty even at a quick glance. The large triple-fan cooler speaks for itself.


The card requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one dual-link DVI port, one single-link DVI port, one full-size HDMI port, and two mini-DisplayPorts. You may use all the outputs at the same time.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU as well. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible, and includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support. The DisplayPort outputs are version 1.2 which enables the use of hubs and Multi-Stream Transport.


The card has a single CrossFire connector, which allows a quad-CrossFire configuration with another Devil 13.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods, etc., please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.