So yeah, before we get into all the tech pornography that is the Nvidia GTX 690 and it's technological make up, we don't have much of choice but to discuss that staggering £830 price tag. That's a huge amount of money to spend on any PC component, and granted 90 per cent of us would never even think of dropping that much money on just a graphics card. But there are people out there (drugdealers and stock brokers mostly) with a penchant for the fastest whatever available and with the means to purchase them.
ELEGANT GRPAHICS
The top fantasy graphics configuration we've been recommending up until now has been the GTX 680 in SLI configuration, and that setup will cost you roughly the same price as a single GTX 690. That graphics pairing is still the top configuration available, if you've got the ready cash, the airflow through your chassis and one mother of a power supply unit. The GTX 690 is incredibly close in terms of raw frame rates to that setup, and has much lower power requirements.
In both fully loaded and idle states the GTX 690 draws less power than either GTX 670 or GTX680 using an SLI configuration. It also only requires a pair of PCIe power connectors making it more universally compatible with your PSU.
Architecturally, it's a hybrid of the GK104 GPU, which powers both the GTX 680 and the Nvidia GTX 670, with two of those graphics chips crammed onto the same single slice of printed circuit board.
Why a hybrid design? Well, each of the GPUs in the Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 contains the same number of CUDA cores that are in the GK104 of the GTX 680. That means we're looking at a total of 3,072 of those particular cores in the twin GPUs.
The two GK104 GPUs aren't running at GTX 680 speeds though. In fact, they run at 915MHz instead; the same base clock as the new GTX 670 spin of the chip.
Now the GTX 670 has been released, though, we can see why Nvidia decided to push the GTX 690 out of the door ahead of its little brother. A pair of those cheaper graphics cards will offer up very similar performance metrics compared with the expensive GTX 690. You've got to really care about the extra 14W of fully-loaded power draw to want to spend an extra £200 on the more expensive card.
We can't help but feel the trivalent chromium plating and injection moulded magnesium alloy are only there in the graphics card’s make up to try and justify the vast expense of buying it.
Yes. the Nvidia GeForce GTX 690 is a very elegant solution to the SLI problem, with its luxury components and design elements, but that price tag still sticks in the craw. Even more so with far cheaper options offering very close performance.
The GTX 690 is beautifully designed, but the performance it offers isn't as wondrous as the cheaper GTX 670 SLI alternative.
Basic Specifications | |
|---|---|
| Part Code | GTX 690 |
| Review Date | 28 Jul 2012 |
| Price | £829 |
| Rating |  |
| Details | www.nvidia.com |
| Interface | PCI Express x16 |
| Crossfire/SLI | SLI |
| Slots taken up | 2 |
| Brand | nVidia |
| Graphics Processor | Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 |
| Memory | 4096MB GDDR5 |
| Memory interface | 256-bit |
| GPU clock speed | 915MHz |
| Memory speed | 1.50GHz |
| Card length | 293mm |
Features | |
|---|---|
| Architecture | 3,072 CUDA cores |
| Anti aliasing | 32x |
| Anisotropic filtering | 16x |
Connectors | |
|---|---|
| DVI outputs | 3 |
| VGA outputs | 0 |
| S-video output |  |
| S-Video input | |
| Composite outputs | |
| Composite inputs | |
| Component outputs | |
| HDMI outputs | 0 |
| Power leads required | 2x 8-pin PCI Express |
Extras | |
|---|---|
| Accessories | none |
| Software included | none |
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