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I'm expecting this to be the real challenge to the King 5970 miner (using Mhash/Watt metric) ... based on the tick-tock dev. cycle.

Max power draw ~300W on 850 MHz stock, (4096 stream processors is the key).

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/AMD-Radeon-HD7990-HD7950-ati,14366.html (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/AMD-Radeon-HD7990-HD7950-ati,14366.html)

http://www.techpowerup.com/157320/AMD-Dual-GPU-Radeon-HD-7990-to-Launch-in-Q1-2012-Packs-6-GB-Memory.html (http://www.techpowerup.com/157320/AMD-Dual-GPU-Radeon-HD-7990-to-Launch-in-Q1-2012-Packs-6-GB-Memory.html)

Pity all that 6Gbyte mem. goes to waste for mining ... maybe could use that as a selling point for re-sale to gamers ... GPU memory hardly used!

The price of 1 x 7990 is < 2 x 7970

7990 is going to be ssssssiiiiiiiiiiccccckkkkk!!!

The first gigahash card your's for only ~$900 :'(

yup, if you count hardware costs into the equation....  it will a while before the 5970 is dethroned.

Then you also have to factor in availability.  You are rolling the dice on used/refurb hardware. 

Same as it ever was with production machinery (tractors, loaders, diggers, dozers, factory plant)

Do you go with the clapped-out or good used with potentially higher maintenance costs and failure risks or the guaranteed, shiny new with known resale value and output?

Pity we couldn't get some pre-release samples to allow the OpenCL miner kernels to be tuned up for those 4096 processors before it hits the streets (or basements in this case). Anyone got a line to AMD GPGPU OpenCL dev. team?

Yah AMD is kind of known for having little to no support teams for developers.  My understanding their new CEO is attempting to change that. 

As someone mentioned above, it may not hash well per dollar, but its resale value is higher.

So is this going to be better or worse than the 5970s ?

Hash per capital expense dollar will be higher but I'm betting once the codes are tuned then hash power per running cost dollar will be superior to the 5970 ... so somewhere in between FPGA's and 5970 with trade-off between running cost and capex.

*looks into crystal ball* a bit over 1Gh/s at a bit over 250W with memory underclocked, ~300W at stock mem clock.
Bump core voltage to 7970 levels, memory to min clock, core clock to well >1.1GHz and you're probably looking at >1.3Gh/s at ~400W.
Compared to $299 5970s it obviously loses massively for price/perf, but supplies of those are drying up.
Compared to $699 6990s, even at $899 it looks like a clear winner; higher density, higher efficiency, better price/perf.
And likely far greater % of retained resale value.

Any idea where i could get the 5970 for $299?.

NewEgg.com had them at that price a few weeks ago.  They're all gone now.

I picked up the 5970's for $329.  The average ebay selling price on used is around $350, new closer to $420.

You know how hardware review sites can sometimes get samples of the cars to test.I'd like to request a sample of this card HD7990.How do I go about it? I heard of this possibility in another thread on here.I'd love to get my hands on it (Now I gotta find me a beefed up PSU first).