Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 was the king of single-GPU card graphic card, and possibly single-card graphic card of DirectX 11 as it’s very capable of rivalling the AMD Radeon HD5970. However, the life of being on the throne sure is short-lived for the GTX 580, as AMD has thrown in their Radeon HD6990 officially. The new dual-chip Radeon HD 6990 has arrived, and succeeds the mighty Radeon HD 5970 which has served AMD very well for all these months. The AMD Radeon HD 6990 was launched today and is already the fastest single expansion board you can possibly plug into your almighty blisteringly fast rig, until Nvidia release the GTX 590 (or GTX 595) of course. But for now, this will very much do the trick.

Spec wise, the 6990 boasts a massive 4GB of GDDR5, 3,072 Stream Processors, 64 ROPs, and an 830MHz core clock speed. Similar to the Radeon HD6000-series cards, a dual-BIOS switch will let you crank that clock up to 880MHz with a corresponding increase in voltage, but don’t expect to see much overclocking headroom above that, since this card is already pretty much reaching its limit while giving Nvidia a punch in the face, after its single-GPU Radeon failed to deliver.

However, do take notice that this beast actually demands 375W of juice from your computer, so make sure that your personal nuclear power plant is capable of supporting it. The cooler is also using a very familiar vapour chamber cooling system that Nvidia also use in their latest graphic cards. This new cooling system is said to be able to chill off 450W of thermal output.

Now that it’s out, I’m very much anxious of Nvidia’s reply.

Read the full review over at Anandtech