 Ah, yes, it is high end, and I mean very high end, graphics card unboxing time again. This is the Radeon HD6990. It features HD3D technology, Ifinity technology, apparently a PCI Express 2.1 bus, although that's not really a feature at this point. But this is, check this out, four gigs of GDDR5 memory. Yes, four gigs of memory on a consumer level graphics card. Madness, and you can see that's one of the things they actually also call out here. We've got five star XFX support, okay, something about Radeon graphics. So, remember, five star XFX support, I'm not sure what all of the stars are exactly, but I can tell you a few of the things. So they do have a modern friendly warranty, which means that you can remove the stock cooler, although there are some reasons not to remove the stock cooler of this particular motherboard, because the thermal compound that they're using is some kind of fancy phase change thermal compound, which you can't really replace with anything equivalent. So it's engineered for the best cooling performance out of the box. Okay, so it's got that going for it. And then it's also got double lifetime warranty, which means that even if you sell the card, you can transfer the warranty to someone else. This is an XFX card, so that's why you get those benefits. Let's see what we got on the back here. So four gigs, yeah, yeah, we got that. Four gigs of memory. Ifinity, with native support for up to four simultaneous displays. Now that's funny because I've seen documentation saying it supports up to five. So why don't you guys just give me a moment here? All right, well, my confidential AMD slide deck doesn't seem to really give me much indication one way or the other. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna break open the seals, and then over the next few days, I will find out for certain one way or the other by just trying it. Same way I often do things. Okay, so here we go. Here's another feature list, DirectX 11, Ifinity technology, 1080p full HD, duh. Display port 1.2, HDMI 1.4a, 7.1 HD surround sound, out via HDMI, and four gigabytes of DDR5, which I guess they felt they better mention again, since it wasn't in enough other places on the box. I'm just kidding, it was. Okay, so I'll put the box here. Let's put this down here, and there we go. XFXForce.com, just in case you guys want to check out their website. So I'm not gonna talk too much until we get the card itself out here. So we've got a North America limited warranty, which I believe is going to be lifetime. But I believe you better make sure you register that. So yeah, there you go. Okay, something about AMD graphics card. There's some drivers, download the latest from the AMD website. Okay, quick install guide, okay. How to use your drivers to be. And then we've got one of those sweet XFX do not disturb, I'm gaming door hangers. All right, some foam, good quality foam, nice closed cell stuff. And there it is, the 6990. Go ahead and pull that out. That is a long graphics card, wow. Okay, so let's just make sure we've finished with all the accessories and then we'll get to the card itself. Here we go. This is here, and it has more accessories in it. So a couple things. First of all, we have a mini display port to HDMI adapter. Okay, next we have a mini display port to, hmm. I can't tell if it's active or passive. Well, let's say it's passive, DVI. And then we have, aha, mini display port to active DVI. All right, so it's iFINITY ready out of the box. Even if you have three DVI monitors. Okay, we've got a crossfire bridge. And let's go ahead and pile all of this back into here. Pile this into here. Let's move this out of the way. And let's admire this little engineering marvel here. That is, as of the time of filming this, the fastest graphics card in the world. So that's it, the Radeon 6990. Let's start at the front. So we've got kind of a classic ATI graphic on the front, which XFX has been using since they started making AMD or ATI, whichever you prefer, graphics cards. On the top, we find something, a couple things that are very interesting. So we've got their new color scheme, which debuted with the 6870. We have two eight pin connectors. Now that is a first for a mass production card. And previously what we've seen is a six plus an eight, typically on the very high end cards. But there you have it. We now have two eight pin connectors. Remember, eight pin connectors are capable of delivering up to 150 Watts of power each to the card, plus the 75 Watts that can be delivered via the PCIe slot. So remember that for later. Okay, we also have something here, which we're going to remove, which is a little caution tape. So caution, read something before something, take it off. Okay, so caution, read owner's manual before removing. Why would you wanna do that, you ask? The reason you would wanna do that is because by removing this and changing the BIOS switch position, remember most of the new 6900 series cards come with this dual BIOS switch. By changing the position, you are actually going to overclock your card well beyond the PCI Express spec and unlock it to a full dual 6970 graphics cores in here, versus the slightly down clocked default shipping configuration. So this is not necessarily guaranteed to work with every system and every power supply and every motherboard, but AMD has left the option there for users to tinker with the stock configuration of the card and overclock it out of the factory just with the flick of a switch. Very cool. Okay, back of the card. Okay, there's like a rubber, couple of rubber grommets here on the back of the card, not really sure what those are for, but that's interesting. All right, we've also got two back plates here holding on the vapor chamber heat sinks that are hidden by this shroud. There's our PCI Express slot there at the bottom. Let's go ahead and flip it over again where we will see not really much of anything interesting. Okay, back to the front. Oh yeah, something else of note is that this heat sink design is not the typical one that we've seen with AMD's dual GPU configurations. So it uses a center fan instead of one fan at this side and then two heat sinks on the one side and then all rear exhaust. So this is a half rear exhaust, half internal exhaust designed card. So what that means is that AMD was able to use two identical heat sinks. In the past, they were typically using an aluminum heat sink closest to the fan where it gets the cooler air and then a copper heat sink further away from the fan to get a little bit more cooling power out of it. But now, since both GPUs are cooled in the same way by the fan, they actually both use identical vapor chamber coolers. So there you can see that all the exhaust comes out this way. You can actually kind of see the, yeah, there you can see the copper of the vapor chamber with the aluminum fins on top of it. And then let's go ahead and turn the card around this way where we will also be able to see the fins down there. I hope you guys can see that. There you go. As well as the rear output. So this doesn't really shed any additional light on whether or not it supports five simultaneous displays out. So yeah, we'll figure that out later but we've got one DVI and four mini display port. I can tell you guys now it supports at least four way affinity. So yeah, we'll figure out exactly how much further than at least that it goes later on. Now, power for this board. Actually, let's talk overall specs here. So by default, the card comes clocked at 830 megahertz and it is capable of 5.1 teraflops of overall compute performance. But if you go ahead and flick this switch, it actually turns up the core voltages and it overclocks the cores to 880 megahertz. Now in terms of the stream processors and all of the other architectural information about these cores on here, these are both full Cayman cores. So it is essentially two 6970s once you have flipped the switch and unlocked the full power of the board. Now, speaking of power, it runs at a maximum power of, well, for typical gaming load, about 350 watts when you do not flip the switch and it can get as high as 415 watts or even as high as 450 at the very maximum. That is the ceiling that is built into Powertune if you flip the switch. So what is Powertune? Powertune basically was introduced a little while back and is AMD's way of controlling the TDP or the overall thermals of a card that is capable of, well, up to 450 watts. So it controls the clock speeds in order to ensure that you're not going to burn out your card with something like a FurMark, but it also allows you to deliver maximum performance in 3D games. Now, the overall design of the board had to accommodate the incredible power of delivering, well, electricity to two of these GPUs, four gigs of memory, everything else that they're doing. So AMD's using an all new Volterra powered VRM that is going to deliver clean, stable power to your 6990 card. So thank you for checking out my unboxing. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips as well as my NCIXCOM channel where I'm gonna be filling you guys in with more details about this card as I have them. Don't forget to subscribe. I think I just said that. Hello.