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We reviewed the AMD HD7990 ‘Malta' Graphics card last month. There was no doubt that AMD were back in the high end game, challenging the GTX690 for top performance position. For those who missed the launch the HD7990 it is a dual GPU solution comprising 8.6 billion transistors, 4096 stream processors – capable of 8.2 TFLOPS of compute power.
The AMD HD7990 incorporates 6GB of GDDR5 memory and can support 5 monitors simultaneously. It has 48 lanes to deliver 96GB/s of intergpu bandwidth.
Since the product launched in April AMD's partners have struggled to bring these cards to market. Nothing is more annoying that a paper launch, especially when the demand seems high for the new AMD flagship. Sapphire sent us their card last week and we have spent some time playing with the hardware in a QUAD CFx configuration, paired up with our AMD HD7990 reference sample.
Before we go any further regular readers may remember our short Quadfire article published at the start of the year. In this article we paired up two VTX3D HD7990's in Quad Crossfire and it was an unmitigated disaster. At this stage, the HD7990 wasn't an official AMD part, so driver support didn't seem to get any priority.
With the release of the official HD7990 Malta in April, we had hoped that this would change. We are glad to report, that it has.
As part of AMD’s Never Settle Reloaded campaign, the bundle includes access codes to eight of the latest and most exciting games, including BioShock Infinite, Crysis3, FarCry3, and TombRaider.
Above, a reference graph lifted from one of the AMD slides. We can see that the new HD7990 is basically two HD7970 GHZ Edition cards crammed into a single card. It is built around the 28nm manufacturing process with 8.6 billion transistors on the card. It is clocked at 1GHZ and has 4,096 stream processors. There are 256 Texture units and 64 ROP’s with a dual 384 bit memory interface. The memory is clocked at 1,500mhz (6.0Gbps effective).
The Sapphire HD7990 box artwork features a monochrome version of their futuristic Army girl beside a large ‘6GB GDDR5' graphic. There are eight games given away with this graphics card, Crysis 3, BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs and Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon.
Sapphire bundle a software disc, the code card for the 8 games, and a plethora of video converter cables and a Crossfire cable.
The Sapphire HD7990 is identical to the AMD HD7990 reference card, although the two outside fans have ‘Sapphire' branded stickers on them. The cooler is still a black plastic shell with three large fans which take up the full length of the PCB. The rear of the card has a backplate in place for protection and to help enhance memory cooling.
The Sapphire HD7990 takes power from two 8 pin power connectors, as we would expect.
The card is Crossfire capable, and we will be looking at this later in the review. There is also a dual bios switch close to the Crossfire connector.
The HD7990 has a single dual link DVI output, and 4 additional mini Displayport connectors. It can support all five output connectors simultaneously, if you want to power five monitors.
The images below are taken from our previous launch article – the cards are identical, so we didn't feel the need to disassemble the Sapphire version.
The rear backplate is used to cool some of the GDDR5 memory, additionally it offers protection against damage. The backplate has little thermal pads in place to transfer heat from the memory chips on the PCB.
Above, the main cooler, after disconnection from the PCB. There are two copper cores in place to cool each GPU core, placed on either side of the PCB. If you want to see close up pictures of the PCB, then make sure to visit the high resolution gallery on the next page.
As the images above show, the AMD HD7990 Malta cooler is designed in ‘two halves’, with a dedicated heatsink for each core. Each heatsink has four thick copper heatpipes which run into the aluminum fins to dissapate the heat. The three fans are placed above the heatsinks and ensure adequate cool air circulates.
Two of the fans are doubled up into a single fan header, and the other fan is connected to a header on the other side of the PCB.
A GPUz screenshot of the Sapphire HD7990 running the latest Catalyst 13.5 Beta 2 drivers. We discussed the hardware configuration in detail on the last page.
Our test system uses the ultra high end Asus Rampage IV Extreme. We installed both HD7990's in adjacent slots on the motherboard. There were no problems initially however the fans on the top card quickly began to work overtime when we started the testing. The backplate on these cards does get quite hot under load.
In this configuration, the three fans on the top HD7990 were directly sucking in warm air radiated from the back plate on the lower card. The bottom card was working as expected, but the top card was running at around 93c under load. We needed to space the two cards out.
We moved the bottom card down to the third slot on the ASUS motherboard, sadly however the supplied Crossfire connector didn't extend far enough. We have a few extra long length Crossfire connectors in our labs however, so we swapped over. You can buy these 10cm extra long connectors for around £5 from Ebay, if you need one.
Crossfire X worked fine and the upper card was able to intake cool air directly over the heatsinks thanks to the increased spacing. The fans didn't have to work so hard either and the temperatures dropped.
If you want to run two of these cards in CrossfireX it is worth looking into the configuration of your motherboard and if specific slots needed will run at x16 or x8 when two cards are paired up.
On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.
For this review today we are using the latest beta versions of the Catalyst Drivers from AMD and Forceware drivers from NVIDIA. (ForceWare 314.22 and the latest Catalyst 13.5 Beta from AMD).
We built a very high end liquid cooled Core i7 3960x system and overclocked it to 4.4ghz. We paired it up with 16GB of 2,400mhz memory and an ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard.
We wanted to use the best graphics cards on the market today, so opted for the Gigabyte GTX690 and Gigabyte GTX Titan. We don't have pairings of these cards unfortunately for SLi tests, but we include the results in single formation.
Test System
Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.4ghz
Graphics Card: Sapphire HD7990 Malta and AMD HD7990 Malta (Catalyst 13.5 beta)
Cooler: Antec 920 H20
Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Power Supply: Enermax Platimax 1250W
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case
Boot Drive: Patriot WildFire 120GB
Secondary Drive: 1TB Samsung
Monitors: Dell U3011 and Dell U2410 x 3.
Comparison cards:
Gigabyte GTX 690 (ForceWare 314.22)
Gigabyte GTX Titan (ForceWare 314.22)
Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
3DMark
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark
Games:
Tomb Raider
BioShock Infinite
Crysis 3
Sleeping Dogs
Total War: Shogun 2
Dirt Showdown
Max Payne 3
Metro Last Light
All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.
Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.
Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp.
It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:
- Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
- Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
- Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
- Multicore CPU support
- Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
- Powerful C++ API
- Comprehensive performance profiling system
- Flexible XML-based data structures
Crossfire scaling with this benchmark is impressive, increasing from 85 frames per second to 166 frames per second at 2560×1600 resolution.
Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.
We used the settings above at both 1920×1080 and 2560×1600.
AMD clearly have to work on this driver profile for Quad CrossfireX, as we only noticed a very minor performance increase.
Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.
Quad Crossfire scaling is very good, with the score increasing from 55,655 points to 71,008 points. Interestingly, Feature Test 4 and 5 score lower in Quadfire, than with a single card.
3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance.
Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.
The single GTX690 outperforms the single HD7990 in this test, by around 300 points. In QuadFire, the HD7990 score increases to 23,680 points.
3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance.
Futuremark say “Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good.
To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.”
In the latest 3DMark, the AMD HD7990 claims the top spot, outperforming the GTX690 by a clear margin. Quad CrossfireX scaling is very good. The score jumps from 5,872 points to 10,009 points in the Extreme test, a 170% increase.
Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan.
The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths.
We run the DX11 Graphics High 1080p benchmark, available for this game in STEAM. You can therefore directly compare against your own system. Frame rates are rounded up or down to the nearest digit.
On the next page we test the three cards with real in game performance at 2560×1600.
The single HD7990 outperforms the single GTX690, by around 3 frames per second. In QuadFire, the frame rate increases from 139 fps to around 176 fps.
Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan.
We measured performance over several of the more intensive levels with hundreds of units on screen. Our results would be firmly a ‘worst case scenario’.
No problems playing Shogun 2 on any of the solutions, even at these ultra high settings at 2560×1600. The frame rate with a single card is averaging 68 frames per second, and this increases to 95 frames per second when adding another in.
Sleeping Dogs started development as an original title, but was announced in 2009 as True Crime: Hong Kong, the third installment and a reboot of the True Crime series. As a result of the game’s high development budget and delays, it was canceled by Activision Blizzard in 2011. Six months later, it was announced that Square Enix had picked up the publishing rights to the game, but the game was renamed Sleeping Dogs in 2012 since Square Enix did not purchase the True Crime name rights.
We are using the highest possible settings at 2560×1600, including the high resolution texture pack.
Crossfire scaling in Sleeping Dogs is pretty much as good as you will see, increasing from an average of 45 frames per second to 90 frames per second.
Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007.
For the first test we configured standard ULTRA settings at 2560×1600 with 8 times MSAA.
This game engine runs exceptionally well on the latest AMD hardware and drivers. With two cards in QuadFire, the frame rates increase from an average of 102 to 151.
We decided to crank the image quality within Dirt ShowDown, as all cards produced such smooth frame rates on the last page. The results between AMD and NVIDIA cards on this page are not directly comparable as both companies use different algorithms for these settings. It is interesting however to measure frame rate performance when increasing the anti aliasing settings.
We enabled the 8f16x EQAA setting for the AMD HD7990 Malta and 16 X QCSAA for the GTX 690 and Titan.
Crossfire scaling is excellent, averaging 144 frames per second with two HD7990's in QuadFire.
Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter in which the player assumes the role of its titular character, Max Payne. Max Payne 3 features a similar over-the-shoulder camera as its predecessors, with the addition of a cover mechanic, while also retaining much of the same run-and-gun style of gameplay. Max Payne 3 also marks the return of bullet-time in action sequences, for which the franchise is notable.In bullet-time it is possible to see every bullet strike an enemy in detail.
New to the series is a “Last Stand” mechanic, which gives the player a grace period after losing all health during which time the player may kill the enemy that wounded them in order to continue playing, however this mechanic is only usable if the player has one or more bottles of painkillers in their possession.
We used the settings shown above.
Crossfire scaling in Max Payne isn't very good, we only noticed a minor frame rate increase in our tested game section.
After a delayed release from late 2012 to March 2013, the game received much anticipation and hype. Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far.
We used the Ultimate quality setting at 2560×1600 with the settings detailed above.
We love Tomb Raider, it is one of the best games released in the last year. Crossfire scaling is excellent in our tests, with the frame rate increasing from 66 fps to 126fps.
Metro: Last Light (formerly Metro 2034) is a first-person shooter video game developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was released in May 2013. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features action-oriented gameplay with a combination of survival horror elements.
Previously announced as Metro 2034, the game is a sequel to Metro 2033, and although author Dmitry Glukhovsky has apparently been working with the developers, it bears no relation to the book Metro 2034. Initially, the game was to be published under THQ and expected to be released in the middle of 2012; it was announced on February 2, 2012, that the game would be delayed until the first quarter of 2013, in March 1, 2013 the game was delayed again until May. Following THQ's closure in January 2013, the intellectual property was acquired by video game publisher Deep Silver.
During our testing it was apparent that the SSAA settings had a big hit on the frame rate. without this enabled, the frame count would literally double. Some work is going to be required from both driver teams to improve performance.
In Crysis 3 players take on the role of Prophet as he returns to New York in 2047, 24 years after the events of Crysis 2. He discovers the city has been encased in a giant Nanodome created by the corrupt CELL corporation. The New York City Liberty Dome is a veritable urban rainforest teeming with overgrown trees, dense swamplands and raging rivers. Within the Liberty Dome, seven distinct and treacherous environments become known as the Seven Wonders. Prophet is said to be on a “revenge mission” after uncovering the truth behind CELL’s motives for building the quarantined Nanodomes.
We use the ‘very high’ preset at a resolution of 5760×1080, no MSAA is enabled.
I ran into some unusual issues when playing this game with two HD7990's, sometimes the Crossfire profile didn't seem to work until we tabbed out of the game and back in again.
BioShock Infinite is the third installment in the BioShock series, and though it is not part of the storyline of previous BioShock games, it does feature similar gameplay concepts and themes. The game’s concept and setting were developed by Irrational’s creative lead, Ken Levine, who took inspiration from both historical events at the turn of the 20th century, as well as more recent ones at the time such as the ”Occupy” protests.
Enabling QuadFire increases performance from 63 frames per second to 82 frames per second.
The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes.Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.
The three fan cooler on the HD7990 is excellent and outperforms the single fan coolers on both GTX Titan and GTX690.
We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.
We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa.
Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.
KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum
The move to a three fan, dual heatsink cooler has paid dividends for AMD. This is an exceptionally quiet cooler, silent when idle and barely audible when gaming. To be fair, I think the Titan cooler is exceptionally good too, but it is a little louder under load.
Our Keithley Integra unit suffered a failure several weeks ago and is still in for repair, so today we have to measure power consumption at the socket via a calibrated meter – system wide.
Power results were measured at idle and when loading the system in the final ‘combined' test in 3DMark 11.
You will need a hefty 1000W+ supply if you want to power a high end system with two HD7990's in CrossfireX. We recorded an 824 watt power demand from the system under extended load.
Many people have been frustrated with the AMD paper launch last month, only a small batch of cards made it to the United Kingdom and they sold quickly. This week we could only find stock of the ASUS HD7990 on Scan UK … for a whopping £958.80 inc vat. This is £110 more than we were told by AMD at the end of April, and is hugely disappointing.
Granted, we did say in our launch article that the ultra high end gaming audience aren't too bothered about paying a price premium, but AMD partners need to get the retail price of these cards back below the £900 inc vat mark. If you want to game with the new HD7990 Malta then be prepared to pay through the nose.
In regards to performance, there is no doubt that the HD7990 is a monster card able to power through any game we tested, both at 2560×1600 (30 inch) and 5760×1080 resolutions (3×24 inch).
The Sapphire HD7990 isn't a new design that we can report on, it is basically the reference AMD solution, with a couple of different stickers on the fans. Not that this is a bad thing, because AMD finally sorted out their shoddy reference cooling solution of previous generations, incorporating three large fans and a substantial dual heatsink cooling solution underneath. This is the best cooler that AMD have released, and outperforms the competing Nvidia parts. As the three fans spin so slowly noise emissions are also very low, which is an added bonus.
We did mention this in our launch article but there really is no need to buy a HD7990 if you are using a single 24 inch screen (unless you want bragging rights) – the GTX680 or HD7970 are really more than enough to power the latest Direct X 11 engines at 1080p. When you move to a 30 inch screen, or three 24/30 inch screens it makes more sense, especially with high levels of anti aliasing.
While we experienced a ton of issues with the non reference AMD HD7990 design earlier this year in QuadFire, AMD have clearly been working hard behind the scenes to ensure their drivers work when two Malta HD7990's are paired up. If you have read the complete review you will have seen that Quad Crossfire performance varies a lot depending on the benchmark or game being run. While some of the titles don't offer great scaling yet, they at least run without crashing, or hard locking the system. We never had so many blue screens when we tried this back in January this year, so it is great to see this problem no longer ruins the experience.
When building a rig enthusiast users often make the mistake of buying the highest wattage power supply they can get their hands on. You don't need a 1000W supply to power a high end 3770k and HD7870 build, even if its a Crossfire configuration. This system we built today however is a very different story.
With two HD7990's in QuadFire, our overclocked Core i7 3960X system demanded around 830Watts under load, which would be pushing a 1000W above 80% of its rated output. An ideal unit for this build would be the Seasonic Platinum 1000W unit (£195), which we tested to deliver almost 1,200watts under load. Efficiency of this power supply at an 80% power drain would be around 92 percent. Another good choice for this HD7990 QuadFire system would be the Corsair AX1200i Digital ATX power supply (£260), which we tested back in August 2012. We managed to get 1,324Watts out of this before it shut down, so even with a 830Watt load, it would be a 63% total power demand. Efficiency at this demand would also be around 92 percent.
EDIT 28th May 2013: AMD sent us an update on the older HD7990 QuadFire problems. Read it here.
Pros:
- class leading cooling system.
- very quiet under load.
- astonishing frame rate performance.
- good cooling performance.
- eight high grade games with the Sapphire HD7990 (Crysis 3, BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs and Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon.)
Cons:
- price point seems higher than we expected at launch in April.
- be prepared to pay £200 for a flagship power supply if you want two of these cards.
- Needs a powerful system and a 30 inch screen (or multiple screens) to get the most from it.
Kitguru says: When one HD7990 isn't enough? buy two! Just make sure your system (and bank balance) is up to the task.
