Nvidia kept this one quiet, but early on Sunday morning it revealed what will, almost certainly, become the fastest graphics card on the planet. As naming convention dictates it’s a dual-GPU card and, as high-end gaming silliness dictates, it arrived at the office in a wooden crate.
We found the office crowbar and got to work and, within seconds, the GTX 690 was laid bare: cold industrial aluminium, a pair of windows looking through to the two vapour chamber coolers within, and the large central fan that’s saddled with the unenviable task of keeping the two cores cool.
Those cores are tweaked GTX 680 chips. There are still 1,536 stream processors per core, which equates to 3,072 across the entire card, but the table-topping clock speed of 1,006MHz has been lowered to 915MHz, with its maximum boost of 1,058MHz now standing at 1,018MHz.
Elsewhere, the numbers are just as impressive as they were on the original GTX 680: 3.5 billion transistors in each core makes for a 7 billion total across the 282mm PCB, and there’s 4GB of RAM across the card running at 6,008MHz.
Nvidia claims the GTX 690 is more power efficient than two GTX 680s running in SLI, but the new card still needs a pair of eight-pin power sockets on its backplate. Display outputs, meanwhile, stretch to three DVI-I ports and a mini DisplayPort socket.
One thing Nvidia is keeping close to its chest, though, is price. The GTX 690 will begin hitting shops on May 3, with wider availability four days later. We’re going to strap this monster into our test rig and see what it can do, with a full review going live later this week. Until then, though, let us know in the comments: is this your next graphics card, or does its (inevitably) high price put you off?
