Guru3D GeForce GTX 690 review is out

Damn it i was about to go to bed! Looks like i will be up another 30 min thanks to your timing!

 

Preordered the EVGA model should be here on the 12th May,thanks for the review Hilbert.

 

finally, was looking forward to seeing what it can do

 

Well I really think it's time for me to upgrade. I'm not spending $1000 on a card though. I'm still waiting to see the 670 benchmarks and then I'll decide whether I'm buying that or the 680.

 

You gonna get two of them?

 

Monster card!
Good review, I especially like the CPU scaling.

You seem to have missed the GTX680 from the Battlefield Bad Company 2 chart.
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-690-review/20

 

Great review of what appears to be an extremely well-built and, dare I say it, sexy-looking graphics card. It made me want to buy one and I cannot stand multi-GPU setups!

I was expecting the UK prices to be outrageous but a quick look on Scan revealed an EVGA model selling for £840 which is roughly twice the cost of a GTX 680. Perhaps a sub-£800 price might have been more appealing but at least the card justifies it by looking well-built/designed.

Incidentally, what drivers are these using as the specifications only state 'latest 301 WHQL driver'? NVIDIA typically release a driver exclusively for their new cards but these can usually be installed on older ones using a modded INF?

 

Not yet,i will wait until i get the new haswell architecture in 2013 so i can get full use of pci 3.0,this is when i will also put them under water and put them in my new case.

 

Great review as always! Thank you!

Temps and overclocking ability are very impressive compared to nvidias past dual gpu cards. Shame the price is so high and the cards will be very rare.

 

Off-topic but since this is a full fledged GTX 680 SLI on a stick, does that mean no MARS III this year? I smell an ARES on the way.

 

You going to go Quad SLI later on?

 

Yeah when new architecture comes out notably Haswell.

 

I've been reading some of the other reviews. The Anandtech one was especially interesting as they recorded the temperatures of the hard drive with the GTX 690 and GTX 680 installed. As the GTX 690, like most dual-GPU cards, expels hot air through the rear, the hard drive temperature was 38 C, 10 C higher than the GTX 680 (but 4 C lower than the GTX 590). It isn't even summer yet, which can add 10 C to that figure, and it is recommended that hard drives don't exceed 50 C to avoid corruption. Nevertheless I found that a bit of an eye-opener.

 

Never liked those kind of coolers for that reason, they expel a lot of hot air inside the case.

 

Is it possible to get Blender CUDA tests? I'm using a GTX 590 now for rendering and I'm wondering if 690 does as badly on Blender as it does on SmallLuxGPU as shwond by AnandTech. I don't know how much CUDA makes a difference compared to OpenGL rendering. If the performance gain is as good as it is on games I will definitely buy one. If not I'm going to find a second GTX 590 if possible.

 

@ Paul Narciso - Yeah, I think if I wanted two GPUs then I'd opt for two GTX 680s rather than one GTX 690 for that reason. Two GTX 680s would cost the same anyway and be a bit faster but require more power. And, obviously, that would make more sense for me anyway as I already have one GTX 680.

I'm not that keen on SLI/CFX though as they always look good in the benchmarks when running selected games but the reality is that many games either don't scale well or don't scale at all. I don't know whether NVIDIA are better than AMD in this respect but when I had my HD 5870 CFX the drivers were pretty awful IMO. I only tolerated them for so long because of a third-party app called RadeonPro. Do games on NVIDIA dual-GPU/SLI cards suffer from negative scaling as well?