102 SHARES Share Tweet

Even though AMD remained silent on the availability of New Zealand, the final member of the Southern Islands GPU family, the partners are slowly beginning to launch products on their own. The first out the door is PowerColor, with their Devil13 Limited Edition card.

The 2012 year will be remembered as a confusing year in terms of product launches. AMD launched the high-end GPU product codenamed 'Tahiti' with HD 7970 in December 2011, followed with a HD 7950 end of January 2012. The performance 'Pitcairn' (AMD HD 7800 Series) and 'Cape Verde' (HD 7700 Series) followed throughout February and March. The entry-level GPUs were nothing else but rebranded Northern Islands parts (HD 7500, HD 7600), but they were introduced within six months of the 7970 launch.

However, the high-end part codenamed 'New Zealand' e.g. HD 7990 was nowhere to be found. The company used to launch a dual-GPU version about a quarter after the single-GPU one, but it's been nine months. At the same time, NVIDIA launched GeForce GTX 660/670/680/690, all based on the GK104 chip, with GK107 chips powering the GTS 640/650 cards.

Thanks to PowerColor, we now finally see the first Dual GPU from AMD Southern Islands family, the Radeon HD 7990 6GB. Under the full name "Devil 13 HD 7990", this board packs two Tahiti XT GPUs clocked at 925MHz and 6GB of GDDR5 memory at 1.38 GHz QDR (5.55 billion transfers per second). The back of the board features the "Red Button" which enables the second BIOS – raising the GPU clock to 1GHz. This feature should equalize the performance of two discrete 7970 cards.

Heatsink design is quite impressive, with two 92mm fans and a single 80mm one. The fans obscure view on a large heatsink with no less than ten heatpipes. In order to create this card, PowerColor resorted to a 14-phase digital power management in 12+2+2 configuration. Marketing materials mention 'super cap', 'digital PWM', 'UHB' and PowerIRstage. The digital PWM filters the electric current coming from no less than three 8-pin power connectors, enabling a total of 450 Watts. Add in the additional 75W from the grand total of 525W, plenty of power to go around.

Under the Devil13 Deluxe Pack, the new HD 7990 board comes in a 'rich' package with the Wiha Tool Kit and PowerJack. Given the size of the triple-slot heatsink, we guesstimate the weight of the part will be quite high. The availability of the part starts on September 1st, at unannounced price or availability. We know this is a limited edition production run, and there probably won't be more than 5,000 or 10,000 boards produced.