Final Thoughts

Just quickly before we wrap it all up let me just give you some of the numbers you might be interested in. During 3DMark 11 our core temps came in at only 72c and 61c thanks to the fan running at 100%. Speaking of 100% fan speed that comes in at an ear blistering 90.2dB or DAMMMMM LOUDDDDD!!!!!

Finally we have power draw, normally we would grab this through Vantage, but we didn't test that today so we pulled it from 3DMark 11.That came in at 606w. To give you an idea of how that compares, the Sapphire HD 6990 4GB draws 475w out of the box. And in AUSUM mode, which you haven't seen yet (but something we've tested), we get a power draw of 523w, so you can clearly see the jump in extra power.

On to the performance side of things the Sapphire HD 6990 4GB is already a fast video card made even more attractive by its single PCI-E design. At 1GHz it is just kicked up a notch.

Under 3DMark 11 the Sapphire HD 6990 4GB out performs the GTX 580 SLI setup at stock, Heaven sees near identical performance, while H.A.W.X. 2 again sees the GTX 580 SLI setup come out on top due to the game indeed preferring the NVIDIA options.

Mafia II performance shows very little change and it would seem we hit a bit of a limitation at around the 111 FPS mark. AvP sees some great increases and puts it and the GTX 580 SLI setup right next to each other while FC2 again seems to hit a little bit of a wall that still puts it ahead of the GTX 580 SLI setup.

Cranking up the detail is where we see the setup really shine, though, with just some fantastic performance under our AA tests.

Sure this isn't really going to be an option for most people because 90dB isn't comfortable in any situation. It's going to be great for benchmark runs, though, and shows us some hope of what may be possible when we see companies like Sapphire attach a mammoth triple slot cooler.