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PowerColor Devil 13 Radeon HD 7990 - Speak of the Devil

By James Lu - 13 Nov 2012

Meet the Devil 13

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.

Is this "The new ruler of the gaming world"?

Opening it up, two compartments lie inside.

On the left, the 'Recovery Chamber', and on the right, the 'Equipment Chamber'.

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.

You don't often see a toolset included with a graphics card, but it's a nice accessory to have. The last we've seen where a nice bundle accompanied a graphics card was many generations ago.

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

The three transparent cards line up one on top of the other...

...to reveal your three year limited warranty.

Lift out both chambers and underneath you'll find the Devil 13.

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 doesn't look very 'Devil' themed, other than the black and red color scheme.

The Devil 13 uses a triple-fan cooling system, with two 85mm fans sandwiching a 75mm one in the middle.

The custom PCB is protected by a metal backplate.

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.

A button found on the I/O panel activates the Devil 13's OC BIOS profile, which overclocks the card to 1000MHz, with memory remaining at 5500MHz DDR. Unfortunately, this feature cannot be performed on the fly, and you'll have to reboot to load the new clock speeds.

 

A GPU-Z snapshot at default speeds. Here's the GPU-Z screen with the OC BIOS enabled.

 

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

PowerColor Devil 13 Radeon HD7990 and competitive SKUs compared
Model PowerColor Devil 13 Radeon HD 7990 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHZ Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 AMD Radeon HD 6990
Core Code  Tahiti XT  Dual GK104  Tahiti XT GK104 GF110 Antilles
Transistor Count  8600 million 7080 million  4300 million  3540 million 6000 million 5280 million
Manufacturing Process 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 40nm 40nm
Core Clock 925MHz 915MHz 1000MHz 1006MHz 607MHz 830 / 880MHz
Stream Processors  4096 Stream processing units 3072 Stream processing units  2048 Stream processing units 1536 Stream processing units 1024 Stream processing units 3072 Stream processing units
Stream Processor Clock 925MHz 915MHz  1000MHz 1006MHz 607MHz 830 / 880MHz
Texture Mapping Units (TMU) or Texture Filtering (TF) units 224 256 112  128 128 192
Raster Operator units (ROP) 64 64 32  32 96 64
Memory Clock  5500MHz GDDR5 6008MHz GDDR5  5500MHz GDDR5 6008MHz GDDR5 3414MHz GDDR5 5000MHz GDDR5
DDR Memory Bus  384-bit x 2 256-bit x 2  384-bit 256-bit 384-bit x 2 512-bit
Memory Bandwidth 528GB/s 384.4 GB/s  264GB/s 192.3GB/s 327.7GB/s 320GB/s
PCI Express Interface PCIe ver 3.0 x16 PCIe ver 3.0 x16  PCIe ver 3.0 x16 PCIe ver 3.0 x16 PCIe ver 2.0 x16 PCIe ver 2.0 x16
Molex Power Connectors 3 x 8-pin 2 x 8-pin  1 x 6-pin, 1 x 8-pin 2 x 6-pin 2 x 8-pin 2 x 8-pin
Multi GPU Technology  CrossFireX SLI  CrossFireX SLI SLI CrossFireX
DVI Output Support  2 x Dual-Link 3 x Dual-Link  2 x Dual-Link 2 x Dual-Link 3 x Dual-Link 1 x Dual-Link
HDMI 1 0 1 1  1 (mini-HDMI) 0
DisplayPort 2
(version 1.2 HBR2)		 1 Mini-DisplayPort 2
(version 1.2 HBR2)		 2
(version 1.2 HBR2)		 None 4 Mini-DisplayPort
HDCP Output Support Yes Yes  Yes Yes Yes Yes
Launch Price US$999 US$999  US$549 US$499 US$699 US$700
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amd powercolor gaming devil 13 dual gpu radeon hd 7990
8.5
Compare This | Specifications
  • Performance 8
  • Features 8.5
  • Value 8
The Good
The only modern custom dual-GPU card on the market
Performance equals dual Radeon HD 7970
Effective triple-fan cooling system
Packaging and extra tools
The Bad
Doesn't surpass NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690
High power consumption (on idle)
Very large and heavy
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