AMD's Radeon HD 6990: The New Single Card King
by Ryan Smith on March 8, 2011 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- AMD
- Radeon HD 6990
- GPUs
Mass Effect 2
Electronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.
Mass Effect 2’s results end up mirroring DIRT 2 here, which isn’t a good thing for AMD. Once again the 6990 has more in common with the 6950CF than it does the 6970CF, and overclocking will not solve the problem. Meanwhile NVIDIA easily takes the game with even the GTX 560 SLI. The one bright spot here is that the 6990’s advantage over the 5970 has recovered, pushing out to 21%.
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ET - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
If you're going to keep your case open all day with your ear to the graphics card, then you might get that 70dB+, which won't be too nice on the ear. On the other hand you won't get much gaming done. :)I don't know the exact distance Anandtech measured this noise at, but Kitguru measured at about 1 metre and got 48dB when running Furmark, 40dB for normal load.
bobsmith1492 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
70dB is very low and only would apply if you are essentially living next to your computer - that's a 24-hour exposure level.NIOSH recommends 85dB as the upper limit for 8 hours of exposure, with a 3dB exchange rate - that is, every time you halve the amount of time you're exposed to the sound you can increase the volume by 3dB.
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/96-110/appF.html
looniam - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
*ahem*"The document identifies a 24-hour exposure level of 70 decibels as the level of environmental noise which will *prevent* any measurable hearing loss over a lifetime"
does NOT say what the maximum is.
from my experience as an audio tech:
95dB is the start of temporary hearing loss, 110dB is the start of permanent and 140dB is the threshold of pain.
and for drunk people, they can't hear anything below 150dB :)
Ninjahedge - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
What?futuristicmonkey - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Any chances for some memory OC benches?nitrousoxide - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Both AMD and nVidia are out of mind, they are ignorant of the consequence by putting two gigantic chips with 5+billion transistors on the same board. I can't find the point of buying such outrageous card instead of building a CFX/SLI system. At least the latter isn't that loud, isn't that hot and consumes hardly more power than those monstrosities.TSMC is to blame. They dropped 32nm so it is impossible to get 6990/590 within 300W power envelope. But neither AMD nor nVidia turn back, but keep making these non-sense flagship cards.
Figaro56 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
No, it's not.Amuro - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
I will be water cooling them! :)nitrousoxide - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
What a shame it will be when next-generation 28nm Single GPU flagships wipe out these monsters with ease while consumes half the power, running silent.strikeback03 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
That hasn't traditionally happened. Look at the comparison between the 6990 and the 4870x2 - 2 generations, IIRC one process shrink. The 6990 does generally put up much better numbers, but consumes a lot more power to do so. Looking at a comparison between the 4870x2 and 5870 (double GPU on a larger process size to next-gen single-GPU) they are very close, with the 4870x2 overall holding a slight lead. And of course none of these high-end reference cards have ever been silent