PowerColor to Challenge ASUS MARS II with Monstrous Dual-HD 6970 Graphics Card

While between the GeForce GTX 580 and Radeon HD 6970, the former is clearly the faster graphics card, the two share a disputed lead over each other in their dual-GPU avatars, GeForce GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990, attributed to the HD 6990 sustaining clock speeds closer to those on its single-GPU implementation, and a better electrical design. While NVIDIA is fixing the electricals on a revised PCB design scheduled for release in the weeks to come, companies like ASUS are wasting no time in designing their own PCBs that can let the two NVIDIA GF110 GPUs sustain clock speeds identical to those on the single-GPU GTX 580. This would pose serious competition to the HD 6990. To ward that off, PowerColor is working on a new Radeon HD 6970 X2 graphics card, which has two AMD Cayman GPUs clocked on par with single-GPU HD 6970, and having the same overclocking headroom.

The new card from PowerColor is not just an overclocked HD 6990, but also has the overclocking headroom of the HD 6970. Further, unlike the HD 6990, it uses Lucid Hydra technology. The PLX-made, AMD-branded PCI-Express bridge chip is replaced by a LucidLogix-made bridge chip that gives each GPU PCI-Express 2.0 x16 bandwidth. Users can run the two GPUs in either AMD CrossFire (with Hydra features disabled), or enable Lucid Hydra Engine features, and let the two GPUs work in tandem with any other graphics card installed in the system, that uses GPUs of any make and generation. 

   

The card draws power from three 8-pin PCI-E power connectors, power is conditioned by two sets of 6+2 phase VRM. Each GPU has 2 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface. The GPUs are said to have clock speeds equal to, or higher than those of the HD 6790, that's 880 MHz core, 5.50 GHz memory. The beast is cooled by a humongous triple-slot cooler that uses a 120 mm and a 140 mm fan, to cool dense aluminum fin array heatsinks. Display outputs are the same as HD 6970, that's two DVI, two mini-DP, and a HDMI.