AMD Radeon HD 7990 coming in two weeks for $849?

TechPowerUp heard AMD plans to release the Radeon HD 7990 on April 17th for $849. The card is codenamed New Zealand, it reportedly features two fully-unlocked Radeon HD 7970 GPUs with a higher clockspeed. The core clockspeed is 1GHz and the 6GB GDDR5 memory is clocked at 5000MHz. Power is drawn from two 8-pin connectors and the card includes dual-link DVI and four Mini-DisplayPort outputs.

But first, the board shot. Pictured below is the first picture of this beast. Right away you'll question its authenticity for using a 70 mm fan instead of a lateral-flow blower, but that design change serves a purpose. Despite its high performance, the previous-generation Radeon HD 6990 was plagued with user complaints of high noise. That's because a single, normal-sized lateral-flow blower was positioned in the center, blowing through two sets of aluminum channels, at a very high speed. With the HD 7990, AMD on the other hand, borrowed the ventilation design of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 590, to a large extant. It reused the fan found on reference-design HD 7850 and HD 7770, and placed it in middle of two heatsinks.