AMD's elusive dual-GPU "New Zealand" Radeon HD 7990 has been hiding in the shadows for quite a while now, with the last time the card getting spotted was at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit in Bellevue, WA.

According to a piece from VR-Zone, AMD have communicated to its partners that the HD 7990 would be ready in Q3 of this year, with a sampling date of June, which then led to a slip into July. The latest information comes from "confidential sources" who told VR-Zone that the boards will be coming in late-August at the earliest.

Considering NVIDIA have been enjoying the dual-GPU game with their GEFORCE GTX 690, AMD are considerably late to the party. The new HD 7990 is said to come with a very unique power system, consisting of four 6-pin PCIe connectors which will replace the usual dual 8-pin connector. These four 6-pin connectors give the card a multiphase power regulation, which is divided into three groups. The major groups are made up from Tahiti XT, 3GB GDDR5 memory per core (clocking in at 1.5GHz) and finally, the PLX PCIe 3.0 controller.

Will this give the HD 7990 a performance advantage over the GTX 690? It may. It might be possible to really push this card, so it should be great to see what partners like Sapphire can do with a TOXIC card for example. On top of the unique power system, the HD 7990 is set to sport 6 display outputs made up from four mini-DisplayPort and two DVI ports.

This is the first time since the HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition that AMD has supported 6 display outputs out of the box, and like other Southern Islands-based GCN parts, the HD 7990 will support PCIe 3.0 and daisy chaining the Full HD displays through a DisplayPort breakout box. We should hear more about New Zealand at GamesCon which is being held in Cologne, Germany in mid-August.