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For this review today we are using the latest beta versions of Catalyst drivers from AMD and Forceware drivers from NVIDIA. (Force 314.22 and Catalyst 13.5).
We built a very high end liquid cooled Core i7 3960x system and overclocked it to 4.4ghz. We paired it up with 16GB of 2,400mhz memory and an ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard.
We wanted to use the best graphics cards on the market today, so opted for the Gigabyte GTX690 and Gigabyte GTX Titan. We had confirmation the night before publication that the HD7990 Malta will cost around £860, so the pricing is equivalent to both of these cards.
Test System
Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.4ghz
Graphics Card: AMD HD7990 Malta (Catalyst 13.5)
Cooler: Antec 920 H20
Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Power Supply: Seasonic 1KW Platinum
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case
Boot Drive: Patriot WildFire 120GB
Secondary Drive: 1TB Samsung
Monitors: Dell U3011 and Dell U2410 x 3.
Comparison cards:
Gigabyte GTX 690 (ForceWare 314.22)
Gigabyte GTX Titan (ForceWare 314.22)
Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
3DMark
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark
Games:
Tomb Raider
BioShock Infinite
Crysis 3
Sleeping Dogs
Total War: Shogun 2
Dirt Showdown
Max Payne 3
All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.
A lot of cash, but when factoring in the performance characteristics it seems good value compared to Nvidia parts.
It just shows how far ahead the Titan is – its single GPU and not really that far behind the Malta card.
Their partners ruined the launch by releasing a HD7990 many months ago. good improvement over their cards however but it seems so late to the game after Nvidia had the Titan out a while ago, and its single GPU.
I dont buy any dual GPU cards as the driver profiles are so important to get the most from it. at least with the titan it will be 100% all the time.
two titans in SLI would be much faster than this!
@ Indloon – of course two titans would be faster, but they would also cost £1,700! you would need two of these malta cards at the same price for that price analogy to be effective.
CF this and compare with the crash-happy-result-CF-unofficial-7990 test you reviewed before.
I can’t help but not fall in love with this card every time I look at it, I see people talking about 2x titans in SLI are better, Obviously they would be better but the VRAM doesn’t stack that 12GB of power would = 6GB of effective Bandwidth on the cards sadly if you SLI….
this 7990 has 6GB and is half the price… Also you know the 7970 has a better 3D graphics rating than the titan? oh you didn’t know that? did you know that 2x 7970 in CF has more Power than a 690? same thing Duel GPU (expensive one) vs 2x single GPU’s will Always lose.
But its always in AMD’s favor since they don’t put 200-300% markups on all there cards thats why I buy AMD.
G