Velocity Reviews - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690: The Dual-GPU Beast Arrived!

NVIDIA has been making some big claims about their latest GPU - the GTX 690 - namely that it can outperform two GTX 680 cards in SLI. The card has been extremely well received, with most reviewers describing it as the best card they have seen by a long way. Bjorn 3D have been taking a look:

Quote:

"The GTX 680 was the fastest single GPU card when it was launched a few weeks ago. We were quite impressed with what NVIDIA achieved with the card’s power consumption, heat output, and the performance. With the GTX 690, NVIDIA has raised the performance bar even higher.

With the GTX 690, NVIDIA is essentially able to cram two of the fastest GPU into a single card and the result is rather impressive. The GTX 690 delivers about 90-95% of the performance of two GTX 680's in SLI, while consuming 80 fewer watts of power. Not only is the card much more power efficient, it is also quiet thanks to the vapor chamber heatsink. While the card may not be exactly as fast as two GTX 680, the trade off is definitely worth it.

And lets not forget about all the key advantages of the Kepler architecture, like the dedicated H.264 video encoder called NVENC, and GPU Boost. While FXAA, TXAA, and Adaptive vsync will be avilable on Fermi as well, it is also a nice feature on the Kepler architecture.

The one point that may dissuade some is the $1000 retail price. While we do like the card a lot, the asking price can be hard to swallow. The pricing of the card leaves a very difficult decision for a potential buyer when shopping for the fastest card. Should one buy two GTX 680s and have slightly better performance but higher power consumption, or a single GTX 690 for its power efficiency? It is a quite tough decision to make. Also it is important to note that only ASUS and EVGA will be selling GTX 690s in North America."

You can read the full review here.