PowerColor Devil 13 Radeon HD 7990 - Speak of the Devil

The Wait For The Radeon HD 7990 Is Over

The long-rumored dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 has finally appeared, although not from AMD as you might have expected. First sighted back in June at Computex 2012, AMD add-in partner PowerColor has taken things into its own hands and created the Devil 13, a dual-GPU triple slot card utilizing two Tahiti XT Radeon HD 7970 GPUs. Availability of this card is quite limited, however if you hunt around, you should be able to find a few units in Singapore. Bizgram currently has it listed at S$1358 at the point of writing this review.

Meet the Devil 13

PowerColor has spared no expense in playing up the Devil theme with the packaging, packing the card in an impressive black box complete with faux-wax seal and tribal-style Devil patterns.

The 'Equipment Chamber' contains three 6-pin to 8-pin power cables, one mini-DP-to-DVI adapter, one mini-DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter, one DVI-to-VGA adapter, and one CrossFire Bridge. The 'Recovery Chamber' contains an 11-piece Wiha toolset and a PowerColor PowerJack, which can be attached between your case and the Devil 13 to provide support for the 1.77kg card.

The Recovery Chamber also contains the warranty reminder for the card, which itself is pretty cool:- 

The card is one of the biggest around, measuring 315 x 140 x 60mm, taking up three slots and, as mentioned, weighing 1.77kg!

The card itself utilizes two "Tahiti XT", Radeon HD 7970 GPUs. Interestingly, PowerColor has opted for the first generation chips clocked at 925MHz rather than the later 1GHz Edition versions.

Ports are quite comprehensive on the Devil 13, offering one DVI-D, one DVI-I, one HDMI port and two DisplayPort ports.

Here's a spec comparison of how the Devil 13 lines up against its closest competitors:

Test Setup

As usual, the following are the specs of our trusty graphics card test bed system:

• Intel Core i7-975 (3.33GHz)
• Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard
• 3 x 1GB DDR3-1333 G.Skill memory in triple channel mode
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

The list of cards tested and driver versions used:

• PowerColor Devil 13 Radeon HD 7990 6GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 12.10)
• AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB GDDR5 2-way CrossFireX (AMD Catalyst 12.10)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 4GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 301.33)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2GB GDDR5 2-way SLI (ForceWare 301.10)
• AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 12.7)

Unfortunately neither the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 nor GTX 680 was available for retesting with newer drivers, but that shouldn't change their standings much as you'll see in our benchmarks shortly.

The list of benchmarks used:

• Futuremark 3DMark 11
• Unigine Heaven V2.1
• Far Cry 2
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2
• Crysis Warhead
• Crysis 2
• Batman: Arkham City
• Dirt 3
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

3DMark 11 Results

As always, we start with 3DMark 11, a synthetic benchmark designed to test a GPU's performance at various aspects of DirectX 11 such as tessellation and DirectCompute. Using its Standard BIOS setting, the Devil 13 was decent but was outperformed by the AMD Radeon HD 7970 CrossFireX setup, as well as both competitors from NVIDIA. 

On the OC setting, it fared better, showing a 4% increase on the Performance Preset and a 6% increase at Extreme, compared to the Standard BIOS. This put it past the HD 7970 CrossFireX setup, but still trailing NVIDIA, with the GTX 690 ahead by about 2-3% and the GTX 680 SLI config ahead by 7-8%.

As we expect gamers to have the OC BIOS setting turned on most of the time (if not indefinitely) we will be performing the rest of the benchmarks using just the OC BIOS settings.

Unigine 2.1 "Heaven" Results

The Devil 13 performed well in our next synthetic benchmark, which features a high level of advanced ambient occlusion and tessellation. The Devil 13 was best at the 1920 x 1200 resolution at 8x AA settings, outperforming the NVIDIA GTX 690 by 6% and even the GTX 680 SLI config by 2%. At the higher 2560 x 1600 resolution, the Devil 13 was still a decent performer, but wasn't able to keep up with the HD 7970 CrossFireX configuration, which scored a resounding 10% victory. Despite this, the Devil 13 still outperformed both competitors from NVIDIA.

Far Cry 2 Results

Starting off with the older DX10 Far Cry 2, none of our cards had any problems, with everyone exceeding 140 FPS. While the difference in actual user experience was indiscernible, the Devil 13 did slightly trail the GTX 690 on all settings by about 5% at 1920 x 1200 and 1% at 2560 x 1600. 

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Results

DX11 game Battlefield: Bad Company is a useful test of a GPU’s geometry shading power. Interestingly, at the lower 1920 x 1200 resolution, the Devil 13 and HD 7970 CrossFireX config were about 1% ahead of NVIDIA, however that changed at the 2560 x 1600 resolution, where both AMD-based setups fell behind, with the Devil 13 losing to the NVIDIA GTX 690 by 5% and the GTX 680 SLI config by 6.5%. 

Crysis Warhead Results

The Devil 13 scored well in the tessellation-heavy Crysis Warhead, outperforming both NVIDIA setups by an average of 10% lead across the board. This was not all that surprising as Crysis Warhead was also one of the few tests in which AMD's Radeon HD 7970 outperformed NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680.

The Devil 13 was also on par with the HD 7970 CrossfireX configuration, up until the toughest 2560 x 1600 resolution at 4x AA, where it fell behind by about 10%. 

Crysis 2 Results

While there wasn't much to separate the cards at 1920 x 1200, the Devil 13 was slightly outclassed at the 2560 x 1600 resolution, falling behind the GTX 690 by about 2% and the GTX 680 SLI config by about 6%. In actual user experience, the differences between the four dual-GPU setups was minute and effectively unnoticeable.

Batman: Arkham City Results

No surprise here, Arkham City is optimized for NVIDIA PhysX and as expected, both NVIDIA setups far outperformed the Devil 13 and HD 7970 CrossFireX setup. What's weird is the fact that the dual-GPU counterparts from AMD were no better than a single Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition card. Clearly, something wasn't optimized properly on the AMD cards.

Dirt 3 Results

While all of our cards easily handled Dirt 3, the Devil 13 still outperformed both NVIDIA competitors by about 8%. It also outperformed the HD 7970 CrossFireX setup by about 3.5% at 2560 x 1600 resolution. It should be noted however that Dirt 3 is AMD optimized, and that this is the one test where updated drivers seemed to make quite a big difference.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Results

While the Devil 13 was behind NVIDIA on most settings for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, it still maintained an excellent 100+ average FPS at all settings except for the most challenging 2560 x 1600 resolution, 4x AA, Sunshafts Run. Interestingly, this was the one setting where it surpassed NVIDIA, outperforming the GTX 690 by an impressive 10% and the GTX 680 SLI config by 7%.

Compared to the HD 7970 CrossFireX setup, the Devil 13 performed about the same or slightly better, generally showing a difference of less than 1%.

Overclocking Results

For our overclocking efforts, we were able to raise core clock speeds on the Devil 13 to 1130MHz with memory bumped up to 6220MHz DDR. This resulted in a fairly impressive 10% increase at both Performance and Extreme presets on 3DMark 11. Disappointingly, while this was enough to catch the NVIDIA GTX 690 and GTX 680 SLI config on the Performance preset, the Devil 13 was still 7% behind at the Extreme preset. Further to that, once we compared the overclocked figures across the board, the Devil 13 wasn't outstanding.

Temperature Results

Despite some initial reports of thermal issues with the first batch of Devil 13 cards, our review unit had no such problems, putting its huge heatsink and triple-fan cooling to good use, running at a 'cool' 72 degrees celcius at the core. This was much better than NVIDIA's dual GPU GTX 690. Despite its three fans, noise levels were also quite low.

Power Consumption Results

Power consumption on the Devil 13, as expected, was quite high, peaking at 477 watts during benchmarking, which was equal to a 2-way CrossFireX Radeon HD 7970 setup. Surprisingly, it also displayed fairly high power consumption even while idle at the Windows desktop. 

Sympathy for the Devil

So was the long wait for a dual-GPU Tahiti XT-based graphics card worth it? On the one hand, if you compare the Devil 13's performance to our 2-way AMD Radeon HD 7970 CrossFire X setup, the numbers look decent. In most cases, it was able to match or exceed the performance of the HD 7970 CrossFireX setup and it's rare to see a dual-GPU card provide the same amount of outputs as a true multi-GPU setup (for example, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690 isn't quite as powerful as a 2-way GTX 680 SLI setup), although do note that this was only possible with the OC BIOS setting activated.

On the other hand, for the most part, the Devil 13 was not as powerful as its main competitor, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690, even with the GTX 690 using much older drivers. This is largely due to the performance gap present between the GPU cores each card is utilizing. As we found in our GTX 680 review, NVIDIA's GK104 core, which benefits greatly from NVIDIA's GPU Boost technology, is far superior to AMD's Tahiti XT GPU core. In fact, in our testing, the GK104-based GTX 680 outperformed the Tahiti XT-based Radeon HD 7970 by as much as 15% on a number of benchmarks.

Even after AMD released the updated and overclocked GHz Edition Radeon HD 7970, it was still unable to meet the performance of the GTX 680, trailing behind by about 5% on most tests.

With this in mind, PowerColor has done quite well with the Devil 13, as it trailed NVIDIA's GTX 690 by only 2-3% in most tests. As expected, it also performed well in tests in which the HD 7970 did well in, such as the tessellation heavy Crysis Warhead. Ultimately though, the performance difference was too steep to overcome, and it couldn't gain back enough ground to surpass the GTX 690. We suspect the reason AMD never released its own Radeon HD 7990 dual-GPU card has something to do with this, as they must have realized that their own HD 7990 would not be able to compete performance-wise with NVIDIA's GTX 690. It's unfortunate for PowerColor, as the Devil 13 itself is a very well made card.

Still Worth Buying?

Having said that, if you look past the numbers and percentiles, in terms of actual user experience, the Devil 13 provides more than enough power for any serious gamer, with almost all games running at excellent frame rates, even at our highest 2560 x 1600 pixels resolution and at maximum settings. While NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690 is indeed more powerful, it's not by such a large margin that it would effect what settings and configurations you can run, so if you are in the market for a dual-GPU card, don't feel put off by the Devil 13's lower scores.

Don't forget that the Devil 13 is also the only custom dual-GPU card from either AMD or NVIDIA in this generation. As we mentioned in our previous review, all GTX 690s, regardless of manufacturer are built to reference specifications, which means no custom coolers, designs or factory overclocks. Thus, if you're looking for something a bit more interesting out of your dual-GPU card, the Devil 13, with all of its boxed extras and triple-fan cooling system suddenly becomes a very appealing choice, especially when you consider that it carries the same SRP as NVIDIA's GTX 690 at US$999. For those who're just cost conscious, you're better off with just a CrossFire setup of dual Radeon HD 7970 cards.

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