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

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely, power consumption, temperatures, and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

The Radeon HD 7990's idle power consumption is right in-line with, although slightly higher, than the GeForce GTX 690 and a bit higher than all of the single-GPU based solutions as well. Please note, however, that these numbers were recorded with the cards sitting at the Windows desktop. If the system goes to sleep and the monitor is powered down, the Radeon HD 7990's power consumption drops to 143 watts. Power consumption under load is a different story altogether. When hammering on the Radeon HD 7990, its power consumption goes way up. The 7990's power consumption under load was over 100 watts higher than the GeForce GTX 690.

Although the card uses a lot of power relative to its competition, the Radeon HD 7990's triple-fan cooler has no trouble keeping up. At idle, temperatures are a non-issue and under load the card's GPU temp peaked at only 76 degrees C.

We should also mention that the Radeon HD 7990 remains nice and quiet, regardless of load. AMD claims the card produces a lower sound pressure level than the GeForce GTX 690 and GTX Titan under load, but we couldn't confirm that because our sound level meter isn't sensitive enough to report decibel levels low enough (AMD claims 37.8dBA for the 7990 at 50cm while running Furmark). Subjectively, we'd actually say the card was just a tad bit louder than the GeForce GTX 690, but we would not consider loud by any means. AMD clearly put a lot on engineering effort into the Radeon HD 7990's cooling solution and it has paid off in spades. In fact, the card is quieter than a single Radeon HD 7970 and it's a completely different league versus the Radeon HD 7970 CrossFire setup. AMD deserves some kudos for this one.

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