Hey all
On April 16, 2020, I met a guy on ebay, he was selling one for 119 Euros and the shipping was 10 Euros I was like well that's nice I mailed the owner of he would reserve it since 119 For an AMD R900 Antilles Reference Board is not expensive at all. it's stil quite capable for most of today's games like The Witcher 2 & 3 and Dragon Age Inquisition but games like Doom 2016 would also be able to run on it quite well, that too I will test
So here that sale of that HD 6990 back in 2011 these went for 749 Eur on release they werethe top of the range back then
https://www.ebay.ie/itm/AMD-RADEON-HD6990-4GB-PCI-EXPRESS-VIDEO-GRAPHICS-CARD-GDDR5-256BITx2/353016033310
As you can see, this is a Dual GPU board, it has powered by Dual RV970 XT Cayman GPU's with each 2GB 256Bit GDDR5 on a single PCB, the ATi/XilinX PCI-E 2.0 x16 Bridge chip allows both GPU's to work together in Dual Chip CFX Mode.
So basically this is like having two Radon HD 6970 2GB GDDR5 cards on a single PCB and you could get a second for Quad CrossFire X Four GPU's of pure madness
Here the specs of these R900 boards:
AMD Radeon HD 6990 PCI-E 4GB 512Bit GDDR5 Rev 002 1136
GPU's 2x RV970 XT Cayman VLIW4 GPU's
2x 2GB 256Bit GDDR5
2x 1536 VLIW4 Stream Processors
Code Name: R900 Antilles
TMU's: 2x 96
ROPS: 2x 32
FP64: 1/4
TSMC 40nm
Core Clock Bios Main: 830Mhz
Core Clock Bios Secondary: 880Mhz
VRAM Clock: 1250Mhz
Transistor Count: 2x 2.64 Billion
So I showed the seller my past collections from 3dfx ATI/AMD< NVIDIA S3 Matrox, all the Opteron Servers & Workstations, the 3dfx Retro System, the Star Wars & Dino Riders collections the B747's you name it and he was so amazed and he wanted to gift me the card instead as gift of honor and he hoped I would not say no all I had to pay of the 10 Eur shipping
So basically I got a card of 119 euro for 10 euro, just mind gobbelingly crazy
vintage_treasures82:
Give me your name and full address and I will send you the video card for free, you just pay me 10 euro for transport, that is all. And I am not joking
I hope you agree,
Dan.
So yeah, I could not refuse that lmao
Best day ever when it comes to collecting rare graphics cards like this one.
Here some pics the seller made of the card I was getting:
So after it arrived here the card before cleaning:
After looking at it I saw dark gray dust in it and was like yeaps time to take a look under the hood, right
So after taking it a apart I cleaned it like I did with my previous R900 Antilles Reference Board from back in 2014.
Took it apart washed and cleaned every part soap & water did the trick for the plastic parts and turpentine & Anti-Synthetic Alcohol or wtf it's called to clean off the terps, my old method as I have used for the 800+ Graphics cards I had in the past, let me put it that way lmao.
I just improvise and used my brain and made the best of it.
So here the card all cleaned up, there was tons of dried up clay residue around the chips, I had to clip it off with my finger nails after soaking it with turpentine and this was a slow process it took me four hours to get rid of that cheap crap.
But yea, as you can see, hard work always pays off doesn't it, also the second picture shows the PCB Date of 1136 and Revision could (002) or this is batch number? I made my guess it's the Revision, I could be mistaken as usual Oh well.
Here all the parts in their cleaned stage, after this I also reapplied the two RV970 XT Cayman GPU's with Noctua NH-1 Thermal Compound, some say don't use this ,w ell I do use it and it has done considerably better than most over priced compounds, and since I was overstocked by it from all the Opterons & systems I built for my family I took good use of the stuff:
And here the card in it's fully renovated new state, yes it's like new again
Next thing was games that in the second post