First impressions are good, with the sleek black design of the reference cooler being the first thing to hit you. The accompanying bright red pin stripes are reminiscent of an 80's sports car which isn't a bad thing as it hints at the hidden power underneath the massive cooler. While the overall design is basic, I personally like the sleek, smart yet understated look rather than the gaudy stickers found on some. This certainly appears, at first glance anyway, to be a grown-ups card. The raised silver ASUS emblem adds to the overall aesthetics without detracting from the Monolith styling.




The card is a certainly a full fat model, measuring exactly 12 inches (30cm) long, just a few mm shorter than its predecessor, the HD5990 and weighing a touch over 1kg. So not only will you need a large PSU to run the card, you will need plenty of space to house one, not just in length but the card will also require two slots of motherboard real estate.



I'm usually the first to complain when a high end card arrives without a backplate, so I am pleased to report that the ASUS HD6990 arrives with a full length Aluminium plate measuring 1.5mm thick covering all the components bar the rear of the cores. The only items covering the backplate are two product stickers giving the product code and serial number. Interestingly there are also two rubber spacers glued to the front edges of the backplate, presumably to prevent two of the HD6990's touching one another when in Crossfire mode as the backplate gets insanely hot when in use.



The main backplate is held on with screws and as we shall see, sticky pads. While these screws attach to the main cooler, the cores have there own brackets to ensure good core contact and thereby even heat distribution. Each bracket is exposed and attached via four spring loaded screws and are relatively easy to remove should you have a small enough Phillips head screwdriver. While the majority of the power circuitry is shielded because of the main backplate, the core areas remain exposed so care is still required when installing the card.



The centre of the card is dominated by the fan. While this may seem like an odd place to put a fan it actually makes sense. With older X2 cards, the fan was at the end of the card meaning the 1st GPU got all the cool air and its brother was a wash with the formers hot exhaust air. This design draws air in through the centre and equally cools both cores. The downside to this is that inevitably hot air from one core will be expelled into the case.