NVIDIA unleashes the beast in the GeForce GTX 690
by:
John
-
posted:
4/29/2012 4:32:00 PM
You knew it wouldn't be long before NVIDIA was going to release a dual GPU version of their Kepler cards. Well, announced last night at the GeForce LAN/NVIDIA Game Festival in Shanghai, the
GeForce GTX 690 is now available for those wanting speed and have a lot of cash to spare.
The GeForce GTX 690 features a total of 3072 CUDA cores that will work in giving you the fastest speeds possible. NVIDIA has engineered the card to be more power efficient and quieter than if you used two GTX 680 cards in SLI. In part because NVIDIA also created a nice dual vapor chamber, nickle plated fins with a single center fan to help cool the card down when in use.
NVIDIA is currently the king of speed for video cards, and you're looking at two of them merged together here.
Power does come at a price however as this card will be sold at $999.99. That's a pretty big chunk of change there. But, if you do want one, they are available right now.
GEFORCE LAN/NVIDIA Game Festival 2012—SHANGHAI—April 29, 2012—NVIDIA today announced the GeForce® GTX 690, the world’s fastest consumer graphics card 1 —with a bold industrial design to match.
Powered by dual Kepler™ architecture-based GeForce GPUs, the GTX 690 is meticulously designed —inside and out—to deliver the most refined, elegant and smooth PC gaming experience possible.
The surprise announcement was made by NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang during his keynote address at the NVIDIA Game Festival in Shanghai, which is being attended by more than 6,000 gamers from across China.
Engineered to reach a new threshold in gaming performance, the GTX 690 also looks the part. Its array of innovative technologies is complemented by sleek materials that contribute to the exotic design of the card, including:
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
The GTX 690 is powered by a total of 3,072 NVIDIA CUDA® cores, all working to deliver awesome gaming performance for ultimate gaming setups. Designed for the discriminating gamer and ultra-high-resolution, multimonitor NVIDIA Surround™ configurations, 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 2 running in NVIDIA SLI® configuration.
“The GTX 690 is truly a work of art—gorgeous on the outside with amazing performance on the inside,” said Brian Kelleher, senior vice president of GPU engineering at NVIDIA. “Gamers will love playing on multiple screens at high resolutions with all the eye candy turned on. And they’ll relish showing their friends how beautiful the cards look inside their systems.”
The GTX 690 graphics card is designed using GeForce GPUs based on NVIDIA’s 28-nanometer Kepler architecture, following the introduction late last month of the GTX 680.
Availability The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 GPU will be available in limited quantities starting May 3, 2012, with wider availability by May 7, 2012 from NVIDIA’s add-in card partners, including ASUS, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, Palit and Zotac. Expected pricing is $999.