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AMD is set to unveil new a Radeon HD 6990 ultra high-end video card said to beast Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 performance by an astonisting 67 per cent but at the cost of unprecidented power consumption.
Tech pundit Theo Valich of Bright Side News revealed that the new Radeon HD 6990 will have a ‘worst case’ power consumption of 375 Watts, with typical use being somewhat less at a ‘mere’ 350W – more than the average capacity of the common PC power supply.
Valich suggested that AMD, fearful of losing the high end performance crown to arch-rival Nvidia, delayed the introduction of the new ‘Antilles’ based cards so that higher clock speeds could be delivered.
The factory overclocked Radeon HD 6990 OC will, Valich said, be the first card to break the PCi Express power specification with a maximum power consumption of 450 Watts. However the AMD cards will also provide similarly unheard of levels of computing performance.
"To illustrate the amount of performance, this single card has more computational power than each and every personal computer on planet Earth back in 1998," Valich said.
Such ultra high end video cards will be destined for specially designed high end gaming systems from boutique builders, mindful of the extreme power and thermal requirements of AMD’s new ‘king of the hill’ cards.
The chipmaker doesn’t have to ship many for the firm to lay claim to offering the most powerful PC graphics hardware in the world.
AMD will reveal the new hardware in detail on the 8th of March.
