VTX3D HD7990 Review (w/ GTX690 & 6GB HD7970 Toxic CF)

For this review today we aren't comparing against the array of products we tested in 2012. Instead we are comparing directly against an ASUS GTX690 and two Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition cards running in Crossfire. All cards are using the latest Beta drivers at time of release from both Nvidia and AMD, placed inside an overclocked Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition system with 16GB of 2,400mhz memory.

The Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition was one of the fastest cards we tested in 2012, so we thought that adding two of them into a Crossfire configuration would make for an interesting comparison.

The Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition is hard to get hold of now in the United Kingdom but the retail price is around £550 for each card, bringing the total cost to around £1,100. This is the most expensive solution on test today and has a combined GDDR5 memory count of 12GB. We run both cards with ‘Lethal Boost' enabled, setting the clock speeds to 1,200mhz core and 1,600mhz memory.

Test System

Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.4ghz
Graphics Card: VTX3D HD7990 (Catalyst 12.11 Beta)
Cooler: Antec 920 H20
Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Power Supply: Enermax Platimax 1200W
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:
Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition x 2 (Crossfire w/ Lethal Boost Enabled) (Catalyst 12.11 Beta)
Asus GTX690 (Forceware 310.70)

Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:

Far Cry 2
Far Cry 3
Alien V Predator
Sleeping Dogs
Total War: Shogun 2
Dirt Showdown
Crysis 2: Maximum Edition
Max Payne 3

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.

Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia.

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