NVIDIA has launched the flagship of the Kepler family; GeForce GTX 690, a graphics card sporting dual graphics circuits with appealing specifications and a never previsouly seen price for a reference design product from neither AMD nor NVIDIA.
NVIDIA was late to the party with GTX 680, but that hasn’t stopped them from being the first with a graphics card with two graphics circuits of the latest generation. The company aimed to design a card that performed like two GTX 680 in SLI, but with lower energy consumption, and it looks like it has succeeded.
| Model | GeForce GTX 690 | GeForce GTX 680 |
| Circuit | 2 x GK104 | GK104 |
| CUDA cores |
2 x 1536 | 1 536 |
| SMX units |
2 x 8 | 8 |
| Clock frequency |
915 MHz | 1006 MHz |
| GPU Boost | 1019 MHz | 1058 MHz |
| GFLOPS | 2 x 2811 | 3090 |
| Texture units |
2 x 128 | 128 |
| ROPs | 2 x 32 | 32 |
| Memory bus |
2 x 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory buffer |
2 x 2 048 MB GDDR5 | 2048 MB GDDR5 |
| Memory frequency |
1502 MHz (6008 MHz effectively) |
1502 MHz (6008 MHz effectively) |
| Memory bandwidth |
2 x 192 GB/s | 192 GB/s |
| PCI Express connectors |
8+8-pin | 6+6-pin |
| Max TDP | 300W | 195W |
| Price | $999 | $499 |
The base freqyency of the new model is lower than GTX 680 but the nominal frequency, that is GPU Boost, is closer to the original. Other than that it is a GTX 680 card squared, with the exception of the energy consumption that is substantially lower, which was possible through hand-picked chips. According to reviews it looks like Nvidia has achieved what it set out to do.
The performance of two GTX 680 is marginally better, which is much thanks to more efficient coling and circuit boards that allows the card to run at the nominal frequency almost all the time.
NVIDIA’s GTX 680 impressed with its energy consumption, but GTX 690 is even more impressive. According to LegitReviews one GTX 690 card, consumes 83 watt less than two GTX 680 in SLI. The energy consumption is also substantially lower than AMD’s old graphics card with dual graphics circuits, Radeon HD 6990. The overclocking is OK, where the card was moved to 160MHz over the reference with ease.
The card has its drawbacks though, and the largest is without a doubt the price, even if we consider the relation to GTX 680. The graphics card will be in limited supply and is what most would call a “Halo Product”, where NVIDIA can boast about having the world’s fastest graphics card. At the same time we can’t imagine there will be many buyers with the price at this level.
2 GB GDDR5 memory per core – a possible problem in the future ?
Another thing worth mentioning is that each graphics card only gets 2 GB memory. While this is sufficient right now it may not be in the near future. At resolutions up to 2560 x 1440 or three 1080p monitors at 5760 x 1080 the memory might become a bottleneck. Those who worry about this can instead choose two GTX 680 with 4 GB memory, but overall GeForce GTX 690 is really impressive, and extremely expensive.
A selection of reviews of GeForce GTX 690:
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