 This video is brought to you by the Corsair Vengeance K70 and K95. These fully mechanical keyboards are designed for performance gaming. Visit corsair.com slash Vengeance Gaming to learn more. Alright, so we're a little late on a 7990 unboxing, but quite frankly, AMD was a little late on releasing the product as well, because the GTX 690 has been around for quite a while, and this right here is AMD's direct competitor to the GTX 690. So a GTX 690 is basically two GTX 680s, and a Radeon 7990 is basically two Radeon 7970s. So just like the last generation product, the 6990, which was released a long time ago, this features two full Tahiti cores. That's 2,048 stream processors, as well as a dual 384-bit memory bus with 6 gigabytes of GDDR5, and that's clocked at 6 gigahertz. So remember guys, with dual GPU solutions, you only get half of the RAM as your usable RAM, just like you would with any SLI or Crossfire X setup. Now there was a time when I really couldn't recommend dual GPU solutions, or dual GPU cards, and that was maybe when the 7950GX2 rolled out. Yeah, it was super powerful, but SLI scaling issues at the time aside, the biggest problem with it was, man, did that thing run hot, and man, was it loud. They have completely overhauled the way this works. So in spite of the fact that this is a dual-slot card, see, no triple-slot solution, it is still capable of running at a 950 megahertz base clock with a 1 gigahertz boost clock, which is faster by a significant margin than a regular 7970 and almost the same speed as the 1050 megahertz boost clock that we see out of a 7970 gigahertz edition. So full-fledged GPUs, only a slight reduction in clock speed, and a dual-slot solution, and the card's actually quiet. In terms of acoustics, it is very similar to the GTX 690. So this is enabled by a very, very custom cooling solution that is capable of dissipating the 375 watt TDP that this card has. Now that 375 watt TDP is about 75 watts more than on the GTX 690, but by, I mean, check this out, by implementing this cooler that has four heat pipes attached to massive aluminum fins, so I'll show you the heat pipes here as well. So these are coming out of both sides, as well as a huge chunk of copper in the middle here on the VRM solution, and more heat pipes, more copper fins all the way over here, more heat pipes, hopefully you can see those through the ventilation holes there, more heat pipes, more copper fins, almost the entire front of the card is covered in aluminum fins, copper heat pipes, and that chunk of copper right there for VRM. So what AMD has done is they have implemented this solution with three fans and a massive, what I'd normally consider to be high-end aftermarket air cooler, to keep the card as quiet and as cool as a GTX 690 in spite of the higher TDP. One of the other things that really helps this card is it does have Tahiti cores, so it features their ZeroCore technology, which means that when you're idling, only one of the GPUs is even powered on. The other one basically goes off, and there's actually an indicator light here on the back that tells you, hey, I'm turned off, don't worry about me right now, so yeah. In addition to ZeroCore technology, I'd like to take you guys on a bit of a tour of the card itself. So on the back, we find a full backplate, as we've come to expect from AMD's very high-end cards, with two cutouts for the GPU cores themselves, so you can see exactly where those two Tahiti cores are located. You can also see the PCI Express 3.0 16x interface at the bottom, as well as a Crossfire connector up here at the top. Only a single Crossfire connector on this card, because dual GPU cards, so often you see guys on the forum, oh, I'm running for GTX 690, no you aren't, because dual GPU cards count as two cards in SLI or Crossfire already, so you can only link them two by two, or two times two, for a total of four GPUs, that's the maximum supported by both AMD and Nvidia at this time. On the top of the card, we've got two 8-pin connectors, so yes, it consumes a lot of power, about 10% more than a single 7970 at idle, and somewhere between a GTX 690 and dual 7970s under load. This is in large part due to the very selective binning process that AMD goes through in order to get two GPUs that can go on a single card and be running at like a gigahertz when they're boosted up and not go over that 375 watt power limit. On the rest of the top of the card, you've got a bio switch up here, as well as just a very, very sleek looking, but well ventilated cooler shroud. So one thing to note about these open air design coolers is that while they do keep the card itself very cool, they exhaust the heat into your case. So down here along the bottom of the card, you can see it's more open ventilation, so unlike a GTX 690 or even a Radeon 69, actually 6990 went both ways. So unlike a 4870X2, it's going to exhaust heat into your case as opposed to just out the ventilation holes at the back. You will get a little bit coming out the back, but it's, yeah, it's gonna be quite limited, so you're gonna wanna make sure you have a case with great ventilation. On the back, we can also see the I.O., so we've got a DVI port, as well as four mini display port ports, so you can easily run a maxed out iFinity setup off of this single card. So the real question here is for a thousand dollar graphics card. Yeah, I'm gonna mention price. I usually don't because sometimes they change, not expecting this one to change anytime soon. What is the compelling value add? Because you can either get two Tahiti cores or basically a trip to Tahiti, and it's up to you which one of those is better. So there's three cards at that price point. There's the 7990, there's the GTX 690, and there's the GTX Titan. These are very different solutions. So 690, being a bit of an older card, has two by two gig memory frame buffers. So the problem with that is it's just not really enough memory to run at something like a 4K resolution and expect to be able to put sort of high res texture packs or anything like that on your games. GTX Titan has six gigs of GPU memory, but it's a single GPU solution, so while it gives more consistent performance, it doesn't necessarily have the raw horsepower that something like 7990 does or something like GTX 690 does, which puts 7990 somewhere in the middle where it has three gigs of memory that's usable, so six gigs total. It has significantly more power than a GTX Titan, coming in very close to something like a GTX 690, and, but there's more. So it has higher power consumption than 690, significantly higher power consumption than Titan. It's about the same volume as 690, whereas Titan is quieter, and it consumes more power and outputs more heat than either of those two cards. But AMD says never settle, and never settle indeed. This card comes with eight games, or at least it did at launch, and AMD will continue, by all appearances, to support never settle. So if you get a card that's $1,000, but it comes with a few hundred dollars worth of games, is that a compelling value add to you? Are you willing to sacrifice a little bit on your power bill over the next little while, or have a slightly hotter room, or you have to run your air conditioning higher or whatever else? It's totally up to you, and that is all aside from the F-CAT issue. Remember guys, frame capture has become the new de facto standard for how to benchmark graphics cards. That's where you're looking at the actual output frames, as opposed to the frames that are requested to be drawn by the card, which is what a program like FRAPS does. And AMD has a new driver coming that will resolve the issue with stuttering with their dual GPU solutions, but we haven't seen it yet, so it's hard to say exactly how that's going to perform. So I know that was a lot of information in a very short period of time, but if you're shopping for a $1,000 graphics card, basically what you need to know is AMD's higher performance driver is coming, it does consume more power and output more heat, but it comes with a whack ton of games in the box, which might make that a compelling solution for you. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Radeon HT799D. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.