AMD has had a reputation for hot and loud GPU's (with stock coolers) for years everywhere, both forums and review sites. I have countless graphs with them at the top (both idle and load), from the 5xxx series to the 7xxx series. It is mentioned they run hotter (sometimes over 80C) in just about every review I have ever read. Not as bad lately though.
Using the word magical to describe a known trait shows complete and utter shameful bias and renders (see what I did there
) such a comment useless.
Oh yea your one to talk about biased... Hot and loud, ill give you the loud because the 6990's were louder than any GPU I have ever heard in my life. The aspect of the singles being hot and louder than the equivalent Nvidia however, is a complete farce, my 580's were just as loud as a 6970 or if there was a different it was minor. Your comments are literally just summed up as "AMD sucks, Nvidia is better because my logic says so". Any card is loud and most review shows them to be about on par at max fan speed.
A driver won't be able to alter the laws of physics unfortunately. Dual GPU cards produce heat in prodigious quantities, and the HD 7990's cooler just isn't up to the task at the performance level set for it. It is the prime reason that the card throttles down and has minimal overclock headroom. TUL were well aware of this, hence the triple slot cooler. Note that the only other retail HD 7990's are
also triple slot or liquid cooled (Ares II)
The triple slot coolers were the best yes, but the dual slot ones were fine and most tests showed better overall temps
than you and most people give credit. So saying the temps were horribly is beyond me because it clearly shows some pretty low temps compared even to the titan and other single GPU cards (The lowest in that test showing to be the 7950).
Obviously Falcon Northwest, Maingear, iBuypower, and Origin lack your expertise. It's a wonder you aren't a household name.
"Rolls eyes" oh yea mister expert please enlighten us, so explain to me how
This works just fine. Honestly, if your spending already lets say 1400 bucks on GPU's, I would hope at least some thought would go into cooling the computer. The cards run fine next to eachother, the only issue was that some of the exhaust could wind up in the top GPU 0 on card one from the lower card. If that became an issue, put a fan in to help, if your already planning on running a QuadFire of Quad SLI setup, why wouldn't you consider your options on cooling. The Reference 3 fan design from AMD was fine and did its job just like it was supposed to. The "Tul" designed cards and Ares 2 were better options overall, but the reference one was just fine and could be run without much worry.
I believe almost anyone on here could easily make a computer that would just be fan cooled and could cool off any configuration of cards in a machine, if the companies are selling inferior machines that are some how incapable of doing this, that's their fault. Who do I blame for my Dell XPS M1513 with the Core 2 Duo and 8600m for overheating problems on the GPU. Do I blame NVidia for the overheating GPU, or do I blame Dell how not compensating to up the build quality on their laptop and keep everything cool.
As for the stuttering issue, I once again flip the keyboard because im not even going back into that debate whether it was a big deal or not because its just going to be that same song and dance repeated.
AMD's hardware products are generally fine and certainly no worse than Nvidia's. Consoles aren't really their issue either since Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are responsible for overall design and implementation. AMD's Achilles heel has always been the software infrastructure (or lack of). How much determination they put into this side of the business will be a determining factor when hardware reaches the state of diminishing returns - both from the end-users need for upgrade, and fabrication process cost.
I will give you most of that, in the past AMD/ATI has been slow as *&!% when it came to releasing driver updates and such. However, since the HD 6XXX series, they have done nothing but shoot up and fix issues with that with even driver updates that have totaled to about 4 in the per 2 months since around 13.8.
The fact is though, this announcement is right before the R290X GPU has come out, and oddly enough they were not willing to wait to at least try it before stopping which means something up because from a business standpoint, that makes no sense.