Hi all :)
 
This morning my AMD Radeon HD 6990 PCI-E 4096MB 512Bit GDDR5 Rev.A12 1052 arrived from Berlin, Germany after making this nice victory on ebay a short week ago:
http://www.ebay.ie/itm/28...ksid=p3984.m1426.l2649
 
So this morning after unpacking it, I thought to give it a good clean before I really start using it for some test runs :) now normally you'd test it before doing this, that is something I should of done, but alas, it didn't matter since after all of this work the card works just fine
 
As this guide goes I planned to make pics of how I took it apart,thereby poiting out handy to know things, I think this guide might be helpful for all you HD 7990 users too, since the HD 7990 is very similar in construction to that of the HD 6900 I have here.
 
So first of all I gave it a little inspection, seeing if any oddities were lurking about, it all checked out fine, so I flipped it on it's back and started to remove the screws which held it's backplate to place:

The PCB date shows that the card is from year 2010 and week 52 that being 1052.
 
After that I removed the VPU X-Brackets

 
Then I removed these hexagonic screws which held the retention bracket to place via the DVI-I connector, in my country thy are named Inbus screws:

 
After that don't forget these two side screws< Many Radeon's have these on the side, GeForce cards have neater sunken screws though

 
After all that I gently tried to remove the HSF from the PCB, which you need some little force to pull it apart, do take your time doing this though

As you can see the fan connector is still in place, just gently disconnect it from it's place so that the two halves come apart freely.
 
For cleaning I used Turpentine with some toilet paper, and cleaned the VPU's and parts off with toilet paper and pure alcohol, which gave this result:

 
Here an angled shot of the HD 6990 bare PC< that stuff on the ramchips I left alone, as it's from the VRAM pads that are applied to the main HSF:

 
Here the DVI-I and it's four Mini Display Port connectors, just clean them with pure alcohol:

 
Here a nice closeup I took of the main RV970 XT Cayman VPU and the ATI/PLX PCI-E 2.1 Bridge chip, which gives a 16 Lane PCI-E 2.1 connection between the two RV970 XT Cayman VPU's which form R900 Antilles

 
Here the Slave RV970 XT Cayman VPU:

 
Here I disassemble the HSF from the HSF Shroud, by removing them tine screws:

 
Here you can see the Heatsinks & Fan combination that keep cool the Rdaeon HD 6990, each heatsink also has a vapor chamber, the cooler works very well, even that the fan can get somewhat noisy, I don't have an issue with that though

 
Here the rear view of the AMD HD 6990 Heatsink/fan combom nice copper cores there

 
Here I was cleaning the HSF Shroud, from dirt and dust and other bad things, I used anti-bacterial soap

 
The result is a clean shroud with a good look too! Top side:

 
Here the rear view of it, nice and clean, like new again

 
here the other side from the rear view:

 
This is what you get when taking apart a Radeon HD 6990, all the parts the entire thing 100% dismantled xD

Not to worry, I used all them part to slap her together again and I didn't miss a single part or screw, for that matter xD   In total; 7 parts & 31 screws
 
Here the top side of the retention bracket all cleaned up, like new:

 
here the rear side of that same retention bracket:

 
This is how a cleaned HD 6990 would look like without the HSF applied to it

 
Here I neatly reapplied it's RV970 XT Cayman VPU's with Noctua NH-1 thermal compound

 
And here the HD 6990 back in it's original form all cleaned up, ready for use again

Just put every screw back from where you removed them and all should be fine, it is pretty straight forward too
 
Also the rear side:

X-Bracket screws and the Backplate screws are two different sets, the ones that hold the shroud and HSF together is the third set of screws. the ones in the retention bracket speak for themselves, as they are the only ones that belong to it.
 
here a headshot I took of the card after reassembling it back to it's original state

 
Here the cleaned and renovated HD 6990 from the top angled view:

 
Here from the front top side view:

 
Here it's nice looking red lines and it's dual 8 Pin Power connectors at the rear:

 
Here you can see the backplate well in place from it's ride side angled view:

 
And here the final shot showing a closeup of it's single CFX connector and it's Bios Switch, which is set to  main Bios node, my VPU's are now running @ 830Mhz with this setting, the other setting is Turbo mode, which sets them to 880Mhz.

 
After doing all of this I found out that the card runs a lot cooler and quieter, reapplying it's thermal compound did do some miracles and now that the card is clean, it is also ready for Project G34.
 

No worries bud and many thanks for my 29th Blue Ribbon there tooz!
As the placing of this topic goes, I didn't know where else to post this, but as being a non EVGA VGA card, General hardware was the only obvious place, might be an idea to add a section for non branded EVGA VGA cards? Or Various Branded VGA cards? Anyway, just wondering about that
This is one of the better ways to keep all your types of hardware alive, and most of the times, VGA cards can live longer than when their warranty expires too, a golden tip from me there xD

Hmm I have no idea, dunno what I could use for that either , hmm any idea's?
The only way I expected it ran cooler was that the fan doesn't speed up as much as it did before So I reckon this repasting did the job alike