AMD Radeon HD 7990 Review: The Quiet Beast

Name: AMD Radeon HD 7990 Graphics Card
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, April 24, 2013, 12:00 AM EDT

We spent a little time overclocking the Radeon HD 7990 to see what kind of additional frequency headroom it had left under its hood. For these tests, we used the frequency sliders available right in AMD's Catalyst Control center on the Overdrive tab.

Unfortunately, those sliders only allowed the GPU and Memory frequencies to be increased by 100MHz and 75MHz, respectively, which was no trouble from the Radeon HD 7990 at all.

Overclocking The Radeon HD 7990

Tweakin' The GPU

With the sliders maxed out one the Overdrive tab, the Radeon HD 7990 ran with a 1100MHz GPU clock and 1575MHz (6.3Gbps effective) memory clock, up from the default 1000MHz and 1500MHz.

While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of tests and saw only marginal improvements in performance. We're sure there's more headroom left with the card, however, which may be tapped using a third-party overclocking tool that allows for higher frequencies than Overdrive.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, GPU, CrossFire, dx11, 7990

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com