After testing the GeForce GTX 680 last month, it was practically a
foregone conclusion that a dual-GPU powered graphics card based on the
same GK104 GPU was coming down the pipeline. The GK104 at the heart of the GeForce GTX 680
was able to best AMD’s current flagship GPU more often than not in our
testing, and it did so while consuming less power and with a smaller
chip die size. If NVIDIA could stick two of their previous-generation,
much larger and more power hungry, GF110 chips onto a single card with
the GeForce GTX 590, doing the same with the GK104 would come as no
surprise. As you’ll see a little later though, NVIDIA did have a few
surprises in store with the GTX 690, even if we all sort of knew the
card was coming.
According to a few folks we spoke to at NVIDIA, company CEO Jen Hsun Huang told the team to spare no expense and build the best graphics card they possibly could, using all of the tools at their disposal. The result was obviously the GeForce GTX 690, but in building the card, the team at NVIDIA employed a number of new components and materials that set the card apart from the company’s previous dual-GPU powered offerings. In addition to a pair of GK104 GPUs and 4GB of GDDR5 RAM, the GeForce GTX 690 features laser etched lighting, a magnesium fan housing, and a plated aluminum frame, along with a dual vapor chamber cooler design with ducted airflow channels and tuned axial fan. The sum total of all of these things result in not only NVIDIA’s fastest graphics card to date, but also one of its quietest.
We’ve only had a GeForce GTX 690 in our possession for a few days now, but they begin shipping in limited quantities today. So we put our evaluation efforts into high gear and cranked out this article in record time so that the lucky few that can afford this beast know exactly what they are getting...
According to a few folks we spoke to at NVIDIA, company CEO Jen Hsun Huang told the team to spare no expense and build the best graphics card they possibly could, using all of the tools at their disposal. The result was obviously the GeForce GTX 690, but in building the card, the team at NVIDIA employed a number of new components and materials that set the card apart from the company’s previous dual-GPU powered offerings. In addition to a pair of GK104 GPUs and 4GB of GDDR5 RAM, the GeForce GTX 690 features laser etched lighting, a magnesium fan housing, and a plated aluminum frame, along with a dual vapor chamber cooler design with ducted airflow channels and tuned axial fan. The sum total of all of these things result in not only NVIDIA’s fastest graphics card to date, but also one of its quietest.
We’ve only had a GeForce GTX 690 in our possession for a few days now, but they begin shipping in limited quantities today. So we put our evaluation efforts into high gear and cranked out this article in record time so that the lucky few that can afford this beast know exactly what they are getting...
Dual GeForce GTX 690 Cards in a Quad-SLI Configuration. An easy 11 on the Geek Porn-o-Meter
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| Processing Units | |
| Graphics Processing Clusters | 8 |
| SMXs | 16 |
| CUDA Cores | 3072 |
| Texture Units | 256 |
| ROP Units | 64 |
| Clock Speeds | |
| Base Clock | 915 MHz |
| Boost Clock | 1019 MHz |
| Memory Clock (Data Rate) | 6008 MHz |
| L2 Cache Size | 1024KB (512KB per GPU) |
| Memory | |
| Total Video Memory | 4096MB GDDR5 (2048MB per GPU) |
| Memory Interface | 2 x 256-bit |
| Total Memory Bandwidth | 384.4 GB/s (192.2 GB/s per GPU) |
| Texture Filtering Rate (Bilinear) | 234.2 GigaTexels/sec |
| Physical & Thermal | |
| Fabrication Process | 28 nm |
| Transistor Count | 7.08 Billion |
| Connectors | 3 x Dual-Link DVI, 1 x mini-DisplayPort |
| Form Factor | Dual Slot |
| Power Connectors | 2 x 8-pin |
| Recommended Power Supply | 650 watts |
| Thermal Design Power (TDP) | 300 watts |
| Thermal Threshold | 98° C |
Leading up to this launch, NVIDIA had a little fun with a few members
of the tech press. A couple of weeks back, the company sent some pry
bars out to members of the press with “For Use In Case of Zombies Or...”
laser etched into the bars’ surface, adjacent to an NVIDIA claw logo.
Well, when our GeForce GTX 690 arrived we found out exactly what those
pry bars were for...
As you can see, the GeForce GTX 690 arrived in some rather unique packaging. The card arrived encased in a wooden crate, branded with a cautionary warning that some “weapons grade gaming power” was enclosed within. Needless to say, that pry bar came in mighty handy, because you know we didn’t waste any time ripping that GTX 690 from its box and installing it in our test system.
On Saturday night at the GeForce LAN
that took place in Shanghai, NVIDIA’s CEO Jen Hsun Huang unveiled the
company's latest dual-GPU powered, flagship graphics card, the GeForce
GTX 690.
As you've probably read by now, the GeForce GTX 690 features a pair of fully-functional GK104 “Kepler” GPUs. If you recall, the GK104 is the same chip that powers the excellent GeForce GTX 680, which debuted just last month. On the GeForce GTX 690, each of the GK104 GPUs is also be paired to its own 2GB of memory (4GB total) via a 256-bit interface, resulting in what is essentially GeForce GTX 680 SLI on a single card.
On GeForce GTX 680 cards, the GK104 GPU has a base clock speed of 1006MHz, with a Boost clock of 1058MHz. The GeForce GTX 690 has somewhat a lower base GPU clock of 915MHz with a boost clock of 1019MHz. The memory clock on the GeForce GTX 690 is unchanged from the GTX 680, however, and runs at an effective 6Gb/s. If you're keeping count, dual GK104 GPUs equates to 3,072 CUDA Cores (1,536 per GPU), 256 total Texture Units, and 64 total ROP Units. Total Memory Bandwidth for the card is 384.4 GB/s (192.2 GB/s per GPU) with a peak Texture Filtering Rate (Bilinear) of 234.2 GigaTexels/sec.
With those specifications, the GeForce GTX 690 should offer about 90% (or more) of the performance of a GeForce GTX 680 SLI setup, give or take a couple of percentage points depending on the application. We'll tell you for sure on the pages ahead.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690, Front and Back
The GPUs on the GTX 690 are linked to eachother via a 48-lane PCI Express 3.0 switch from PLX, with a full 16 lanes of electrical connectivity between each GPU and the PEG slot. Previous dual-GPU powered cards from NVIDIA relied on the company’s own NF200, but that chip lacks support for PCI Express 3.0, so NVIDIA opted for a third party solution this time around. For those paying attention, AMD has used PCIe switches from PLX on their dual-GPU powered cards.
With the kind of horsepower likely lurking under the GeForce GTX 690’s hood, it will obviously have some heavy-duty power requirements. But considering the GK104’s power efficiency and the GTX 690’s somewhat lower clocks they won’t be as high as previous-gen dual-GPU cards. NVIDIA is claiming a 300W TDP for the GeForce GTX 690 and the card a dual-8-pin power connector requirement. If you're keeping track, that’s over 20% lower than the 365W peak of the GeForce GTX 590.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Exposed
The GeForce GTX 690 isn't just about speeds and feeds, though. NVIDIA has also done some innovating on the cooling and aesthetic fronts with the GeForce GTX 690 as well. Some of the new design features of the GeForce GTX 690 include an exterior frame made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, and a fan housing made from a thixomolded magnesium alloy, which offers excellent heat dissipation and vibration dampening. The GeForce GTX 690 also has highly-efficient 10-phase, heavy-duty power supply with a 10-layer, two-ounce copper printed circuit board.
The cooler on the GeForce GTX 690 consists of a pair of vapor chambers (one for each GPU), each with a nickel-plated finstack, and large center-mounted axial fan with optimized fin pitch and air entry angles. The GeForce GTX 690 also uses low-profile components and a flat, ducted baseplate for unobstructed airflow, which reportedly minimizes turbulence and help quiet down the card.
Just by looking at the GeForce GTX 690, it’s obvious NVIDIA has set out to create a powerful graphics card that also happens to look the part. We should also point out that the cooling hardware is designed in such a way that the fan blows air through the shroud, where half is directed towards the front GPU and ultimately expelled from the system, and the other half cools the rear GPU and exhausts within the case.
The GeForce GTX 690's Outputs: DVI x 3, mini-DP x 1
The GeForce GTX 690 should have more than enough muscle to push multiple displays, and as such, the card is outfitted with a trio of DVI outputs and a single mini-DP output, all of which can be powered simultaneously. Of course, the card supports NVIDIA's 3D Vision Surround technology as well.
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard powered by a Core i7-3960X six-core processor and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR3-1600 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system UEFI and set all values to their "optimized" or "high performance" default settings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist, along with the necessary drivers, games, and benchmark tools.
The new GeForce GTX 690 simply crushes everything in the Unigine Heaven benchmark, which it should considering it costs at least twice as much as any other card in the list and sports two of the most powerful GPUs money can currently buy.
As you've probably read by now, the GeForce GTX 690 features a pair of fully-functional GK104 “Kepler” GPUs. If you recall, the GK104 is the same chip that powers the excellent GeForce GTX 680, which debuted just last month. On the GeForce GTX 690, each of the GK104 GPUs is also be paired to its own 2GB of memory (4GB total) via a 256-bit interface, resulting in what is essentially GeForce GTX 680 SLI on a single card.
On GeForce GTX 680 cards, the GK104 GPU has a base clock speed of 1006MHz, with a Boost clock of 1058MHz. The GeForce GTX 690 has somewhat a lower base GPU clock of 915MHz with a boost clock of 1019MHz. The memory clock on the GeForce GTX 690 is unchanged from the GTX 680, however, and runs at an effective 6Gb/s. If you're keeping count, dual GK104 GPUs equates to 3,072 CUDA Cores (1,536 per GPU), 256 total Texture Units, and 64 total ROP Units. Total Memory Bandwidth for the card is 384.4 GB/s (192.2 GB/s per GPU) with a peak Texture Filtering Rate (Bilinear) of 234.2 GigaTexels/sec.
With those specifications, the GeForce GTX 690 should offer about 90% (or more) of the performance of a GeForce GTX 680 SLI setup, give or take a couple of percentage points depending on the application. We'll tell you for sure on the pages ahead.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690, Front and Back
The GPUs on the GTX 690 are linked to eachother via a 48-lane PCI Express 3.0 switch from PLX, with a full 16 lanes of electrical connectivity between each GPU and the PEG slot. Previous dual-GPU powered cards from NVIDIA relied on the company’s own NF200, but that chip lacks support for PCI Express 3.0, so NVIDIA opted for a third party solution this time around. For those paying attention, AMD has used PCIe switches from PLX on their dual-GPU powered cards.
With the kind of horsepower likely lurking under the GeForce GTX 690’s hood, it will obviously have some heavy-duty power requirements. But considering the GK104’s power efficiency and the GTX 690’s somewhat lower clocks they won’t be as high as previous-gen dual-GPU cards. NVIDIA is claiming a 300W TDP for the GeForce GTX 690 and the card a dual-8-pin power connector requirement. If you're keeping track, that’s over 20% lower than the 365W peak of the GeForce GTX 590.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 Exposed
The GeForce GTX 690 isn't just about speeds and feeds, though. NVIDIA has also done some innovating on the cooling and aesthetic fronts with the GeForce GTX 690 as well. Some of the new design features of the GeForce GTX 690 include an exterior frame made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, and a fan housing made from a thixomolded magnesium alloy, which offers excellent heat dissipation and vibration dampening. The GeForce GTX 690 also has highly-efficient 10-phase, heavy-duty power supply with a 10-layer, two-ounce copper printed circuit board.
The cooler on the GeForce GTX 690 consists of a pair of vapor chambers (one for each GPU), each with a nickel-plated finstack, and large center-mounted axial fan with optimized fin pitch and air entry angles. The GeForce GTX 690 also uses low-profile components and a flat, ducted baseplate for unobstructed airflow, which reportedly minimizes turbulence and help quiet down the card.
Just by looking at the GeForce GTX 690, it’s obvious NVIDIA has set out to create a powerful graphics card that also happens to look the part. We should also point out that the cooling hardware is designed in such a way that the fan blows air through the shroud, where half is directed towards the front GPU and ultimately expelled from the system, and the other half cools the rear GPU and exhausts within the case.
The GeForce GTX 690's Outputs: DVI x 3, mini-DP x 1
The GeForce GTX 690 should have more than enough muscle to push multiple displays, and as such, the card is outfitted with a trio of DVI outputs and a single mini-DP output, all of which can be powered simultaneously. Of course, the card supports NVIDIA's 3D Vision Surround technology as well.
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard powered by a Core i7-3960X six-core processor and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR3-1600 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system UEFI and set all values to their "optimized" or "high performance" default settings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist, along with the necessary drivers, games, and benchmark tools.
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| Hardware Used: Intel Core i7-3960X (3.3GHz, Six-Core) Asus P9X79 Deluxe (Intel X79 Express) Radeon HD 7950 Radeon HD 7970 Radeon HD 6970 GeForce GTX 580/OC GeForce GTX 580 3GB GeForce GTX 590 GeForce GTX 680 GeForce GTX 690 16GB OCZ DDR3-1600 Western Digital Raptor 150GB Integrated Audio Integrated Network |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 DirectX April 2011 Redist ATI Catalyst v12.2b/v12.4 NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v300.99/v301.33 Benchmarks Used: Unigine Heaven v2.5 3DMark 11 Batman: Arkham City Just Cause 2 Alien vs. Predator Metro 2033 Lost Planet 2 Dirt 3 |
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 Unigine Heaven |
Unigine's Heaven Benchmark v2.5 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform, real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark--when run in DX11 mode--also makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) It also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering. |
The new GeForce GTX 690 simply crushes everything in the Unigine Heaven benchmark, which it should considering it costs at least twice as much as any other card in the list and sports two of the most powerful GPUs money can currently buy.
The
latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark11,
is specifically bound to Windows Vista and WIndows 7-based systems due
to its DirectX 11 requirement, which isn't available on previous
versions of Windows. 3DMark11 isn't simply a port of 3DMark Vantage to
DirectX 11, though. With this latest version of the benchmark,
Futuremark has incorporated four new graphics tests, a physics tests,
and a new combined test. We tested the graphics cards here with
3DMark11's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920x1080
with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.
3DMark 11 paints essentially the same picture as Unigine Heaven from the previous page. The GeForce GTX 690 simply decimates everything in 3DMark 11. It's almost funny to see those short, little bars for relatively powerful graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 580 and Radeon HD 7950.
3DMark 11 paints essentially the same picture as Unigine Heaven from the previous page. The GeForce GTX 690 simply decimates everything in 3DMark 11. It's almost funny to see those short, little bars for relatively powerful graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 580 and Radeon HD 7950.
NVIDIA claims that the GeForce GTX 690 had
overclocking plenty of headroom for overclocking thanks to its beefy
10-phase power delivery, and somewhat conservative stock frequencies, so
we fired up of EVGA’s excellent Precision performance tuning utility,
which already supports the GeForce GTX 690, to see just how much
additional performance we could wring from the card. We also installed a
slick GeForce GTX 690 skin that matches the color scheme of the card.
During some conversations we had with a few representatives from NVIDIA in the past, we were told that most GK1-4 GPUs would likely be able to hit frequencies around 1.2GHz, with stock cooling. Our testing proved that to be true.
EVGA's Precision Performance Tuning Utility With GTX 690 Skin
By cranking up the power target by 35% and increasing the GPU Clock Offset by 150MHz, our GeForce GTX 690 would consistently boost to about 1.215GHz with perfect stability and zero visual artifacts. We were also able to crank the memory clock up by another 113MHz for an additional performance boost.
While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of high resolution tests, and when all was said and done we were able to increase performance considerably. Metro 2033 shows a 7.2% improvement in framerate while overclocked, and performance in Alien vs. Predator--which is mostly bound by memory bandwidth--increased by 7.6%.
During some conversations we had with a few representatives from NVIDIA in the past, we were told that most GK1-4 GPUs would likely be able to hit frequencies around 1.2GHz, with stock cooling. Our testing proved that to be true.
EVGA's Precision Performance Tuning Utility With GTX 690 Skin
By cranking up the power target by 35% and increasing the GPU Clock Offset by 150MHz, our GeForce GTX 690 would consistently boost to about 1.215GHz with perfect stability and zero visual artifacts. We were also able to crank the memory clock up by another 113MHz for an additional performance boost.
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While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of high resolution tests, and when all was said and done we were able to increase performance considerably. Metro 2033 shows a 7.2% improvement in framerate while overclocked, and performance in Alien vs. Predator--which is mostly bound by memory bandwidth--increased by 7.6%.
Before bringing this article to a close,
we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption,
temperatures and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing,
we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was
consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea as to
how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a
heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system
power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power drawn by the
graphics cards alone.
WIth essentially double the resources of a GeForce GTX 680, it should come as no surprise that the GeForce GTX 690 consumes more power than its single-GPU based counterpart. But considering the GeForce GTX 690's very strong performance relative to NVIDIA's previous dual-GPU flagship, the GeForce GTX 590, the GTX 690's power consumption characteristics seem downright impressive. The GeForce GTX 690 consumed 39 fewer watts than the GTX 590 while idling and almost 20 fewer watts under load, despite offering significantly better performance. That's a testament to the power efficiency of the GK104 GPU.
All of the work NVIDIA put into designing the cooling hardware for the GeForce GTX 690 also seems to have paid off. Throughout testing, we found the GeForce GTX 690 to be very quiet, especially considering how powerful the card is. While idling, the GTX 690 is essentially silent and can't be heard over a typical CPU or PSU cooling fan. And under load, while the cooling fan does spin up and become audible, it's emits a very low tone that's not distracting at all. After hours of benchmarks, we monitored GPU temps on the card with a constant loop of Unigine Heaven running and found that the GPU temp peaked at around 80'C (idle temps were around 38'C). Even after hours of benchmarking and a constant load being placed on the GTX 690 though, the fan on the card maxed out at only 55% of full speed.
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WIth essentially double the resources of a GeForce GTX 680, it should come as no surprise that the GeForce GTX 690 consumes more power than its single-GPU based counterpart. But considering the GeForce GTX 690's very strong performance relative to NVIDIA's previous dual-GPU flagship, the GeForce GTX 590, the GTX 690's power consumption characteristics seem downright impressive. The GeForce GTX 690 consumed 39 fewer watts than the GTX 590 while idling and almost 20 fewer watts under load, despite offering significantly better performance. That's a testament to the power efficiency of the GK104 GPU.
All of the work NVIDIA put into designing the cooling hardware for the GeForce GTX 690 also seems to have paid off. Throughout testing, we found the GeForce GTX 690 to be very quiet, especially considering how powerful the card is. While idling, the GTX 690 is essentially silent and can't be heard over a typical CPU or PSU cooling fan. And under load, while the cooling fan does spin up and become audible, it's emits a very low tone that's not distracting at all. After hours of benchmarks, we monitored GPU temps on the card with a constant loop of Unigine Heaven running and found that the GPU temp peaked at around 80'C (idle temps were around 38'C). Even after hours of benchmarking and a constant load being placed on the GTX 690 though, the fan on the card maxed out at only 55% of full speed.
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