AMD does foot long sub.

Do you always have to have the fastest, always want the best. Do you have a spare $700 floating around to spend on a video card? Well AMD has just released the AMD 6990 and it ticks ALL the boxes, it is the new king of video cards.

With 4 Gig of Ram shared between 2 video chips – graphics processing units – this is a serious beast of a video card. Hell I know of many desktop machines that don’t have that much memory in total. There are 5 video ports to drive 5 displays. More importantly this card will drive your ultra hi-def monitor – 2560 x 1600 resolution, actually this card could drive two of these ultra hi-res monitors.

If you have a desktop case or even a normalish sized case you can forget about this card. At just over 30cm long – 12inches – this card needs lots of space in your case. Even with an Antec 183 – an extremely large case – a drive cage needs to be removed to accommodate the video card. Power also needs to be considered before buying a card like this. In overclock mode this card will use 450W, so an 800W power supply is going to be a necessity.

The Turbo button is back, AMD calls it the “Antilles Unlocking Switch for Uber Mode” AUSUM or Uber Mode. Several things happen when your 6990 cards goes into Uber mode. The base GPU clock speed rises to 880MHz, the core voltage rises from 1.12V to 1.175V, the board’s Power limit is raised to 450W and it gets this mean look on its face.

So obviously this isn’t a card most people, this is the sort of card you build a new system around, this card will demand a lot of a system. You will need the latest CPU to be able to get the most out of this card, top of the line Intel Core i7 CPU is recommended.

What does all of this power get you ? On games. Try 100 frames a second on most games even at extreme resolutions like Ultra Hi-Def. Never having to worry about what graphics level to choose, just turn everything up to the max and enjoy.

This is the ultimate bad ass video card. It’s loud –58.5db under load -, runs hot but its also the fastest damn video card money can buy. If you have the resources and right setup to slot it into then this is as good as it gets at the moment.