NVIDIA Unveils GeForce GTX 690 Video Card at $999

During a keynote address at the NVIDIA Game Festival in Shanghai, NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang, announced the GeForce GTX 690 dual-GPU graphics card. The GeForce GTX 690 is powered by two GK104 Kepler cores, so it has a total of 3,072 NVIDIA CUDA cores and will easily become the world’s fastest graphics card when it is released! NVIDIA did not send out any review samples yet, so we aren’t sure how good it performs. We all know how good two GeForce GTX 680 video cards perform in SLI though as we did a review on there here. NVIDIA says that the GTX 690 delivers close to double the frame rates of the closest single GPU product, the GTX 680. Plus, it is more power efficient and quieter when compared to systems equipped with two GTX 680 cards running in NVIDIA SLI configuration. Let’s take a look at some pictures!

The base clock speed on the GTX690 is slightly lower than it’s GTX 680 counterpart with a core clock speed of 915 MHz and a “typical” Boost clock of up to 1019 MHz. With a total of 3072 processing coresand a boost clock of over 1 GHz, this video card has a ton of horsepower! Each GPU will have access to 2GB of GDDR5 independent frame buffer running at 6 Gbps, for a grand total of 4GB on the card. The memory clock speed is the same as on the GTX 680, so it is nice to see no reduction in speed there.

With the HSF removed you can see the PCI Express 3.0 capable PLX bridge chip between the two GPU cores. You can also see that the GTX 690 uses a pair of 8-pin connectors, so it will be able to use 300 Watts of power from there, plus what it draws from the PCIe slot. NVIDIA says that the TDP of the GeForce GTX 690 is 300 Watts, which isn’t bad for a card like this.

NVIDIA also made a number of changes to the GPU Cooler and has some exotic solutions in place on the GTX 690:

• An exterior frame made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, providing excellent strength and durability
• A fan housing made from a thixomolded magnesium alloy, which offers excellent heat dissipation and vibration dampening
• High-efficiency power delivery with less resistance, lower power and less heat generated using a 10-phase, heavy-duty power supply with a 10-layer, two-ounce copper printed circuit board
• Efficient cooling using dual vapor chambers, a nickel-plated finstack and center-mounted axial fan with optimized fin pitch and air entry angles
• Low-profile components and ducted baseplate channels for unobstructed airflow, minimizing turbulence and improving acoustic quality

As you can see, NVIDIA has developed an amazing looking card here and we are itching to get our hands on it for testing! This looks like it will easily be the fastest graphics card that we have ever tested, but we have to get one before we can be for certain! The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 GPU will be available in limited quantities starting May 3, 2012, with wider availability by May 7, 2012 from NVIDIAs add-in card partners, including ASUS, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, Palit and Zotac. Expected pricing is $999.