Last week AMD stole the limelight with the announcement it was moving to a 28nm process for the latest mobile Radeon GPUs. This week, it’s the turn of Nvidia, but with a new high-end card for desktop PCs.
Nvidia has unveiled the GeForce GTX 690, a card it classes as the “world’s fastest consumer graphics card.” It’s hard to disagree with that once you’ve glanced at the specs.
At the heart of the GTX 690 are not one, but two Kepler GPU cores running at a base clock speed of 915MHz. That translates into 3,072 CUDA cores powering the highest settings in your game of choice, backed up by 4GB of on-board 512-bit GDDR5 memory. To put that in perspective, Nvidia claims that a single GTX 690 outperforms two GTX 680 cards in SLI configuration. Or looking at it another way, if you currently use a GTX 680, the 690 will double your frame rate. Add to that the fact you can SLI two 690s, and the performance on offer is sure to keep your rig playing games on ultra high settings for a few years to come.
As well as setting a new high in terms of performance, Nvidia has worked on the heat, noise, and power aspects of the card. The fan housing is manufactured from thixomolded magnesium alloy, which is meant to lower the vibration created as well as aid heat dissipation. Add to that dual vapor chambers and a complimentary nickel-plated finstack, and you can tell this card will have no problems getting rid of the heat from those two hot-running cores. You just need to make sure your case fan setup can keep up.
Nvidia has also attempted to minimize power use and heat generation by employing a 10-phase power supply. It uses a 10-layer copper circuit board to ensure efficiency, but also aid quick heat dissipation using that fan and vapor chamber cooling combination. The TDP of this card is 300W.
The GTX 690 is expected to be available from May 3, but stock will be very limited. Cards from the usual group of manufacturers are expected to start hitting stores in larger quantities from May 7. Even so, I doubt many people will be able to afford one, let alone two of these cards without hitting their savings. The RRP for the base GTX 690 is $999.
Read more at Nvidia and GeForce.com
