AMD HD7990 Malta Review

For this review today we are using the latest beta versions of Catalyst drivers from AMD and Forceware drivers from NVIDIA. (Force 314.22 and Catalyst 13.5).

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 had confirmation the night before publication that the HD7990 Malta will cost around £860, so the pricing is equivalent to both of these cards.

Test System
Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.4ghz

Graphics Card: AMD HD7990 Malta (Catalyst 13.5)
Cooler: Antec 920 H20
Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Power Supply: Seasonic 1KW Platinum
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

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.

Become a Patron!