Only a few days ago, AMD VP Matt Skynner flashed a shiny Radeon HD 6990 around at a Fusion launch event, and now it looks like he's back at it again.
This time, Japanese site 4gamer managed to get up close and personal with the card, grabbing a few proper photos and squeezing a couple of new details out of the reps on hand.
If it's not clear from the photos, this card is going to be a bit of a monster, although it seems that AMD has managed to make the PCB slightly smaller than the HD 5970's. A rough and ready comparison to a piece of A4 paper (297mm) shows that the card is just slightly longer, making it a fraction shorter than its 309mm predecessor.
Also note that the fan is positioned right in the middle of the board. There's not much to take away from this, other than to remember that the HD 5970 had both GPUs at one end of the card with the fan at the other.
The model on hand wasn't quite production ready, so it's possible that the six-pin power connector will be upgraded to an eight-pin by the time it's ready for prime-time. Having said, the HD 5970 shared this configuration, so we wouldn't be surprised if this card's TDP was kept under the all-important 300W barrier.
A look at the back of the card shows a single DVI output and four Mini Display Port connectors, hinting at five-monitor Eyefinity support out of the box. Of course, this is the least that we'd expect from a graphics-card with this much horsepower.
Unfortunately there are no new details on what's under the bonnet, but our best guess still suggests a pair of Cayman GPUs with 3,072 shaders and 4GB RAM.
There's still no official word from AMD, but with the company actively trying to build hype around its new card and a planned Q1 launch, we wouldn't be surprised to see the HD 6990 arriving in the next month or so. Start saving those pennies!
