Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang delivered the keynote address at the GeForce LAN/Nvidia Game Festival in Shanghai this weekend and in celebration of that event he rolled out the Nvidia GEForce GTX 690 Dual-GPU video card.
Announced just one month after the GTX 680, the new video card relies on the new 28nm Kepler architecture and Huang claims that the GTX 690 had been:
“Designed from the ground up to deliver the highest performance of any graphics card in history. This particular graphics card we paid special attention to every single detail so that we could deliver the highest thermals, the highest acoustics, and the highest electrical performance with this particular design.”
The GTZ 690 is quite the piece of machinery to behold, featuring 3,072 CUDA parallel processing cores the system essentially has the same performance levels at two GTX 680 cards, yet the card runs more quietly than that offering while providing better power efficiency.
The SLI configuration of the cards also contains 4GB of 6GHz GDDR5 RAM and all of the other features found on the former GTX 680 GPU.
Nvidia was also happy to announce that the card has been redesigned to feature a trivalent chromium-plated aluminum which Nvidia claims provides better build durability. The GTX 690 also offers a new fan housing made from thixomolded magnesium alloy which helps with heat dissipation and vibration dampening.
According to PCMag the card is also built with:
High-efficiency power delivery thanks to the use of a ten-phase power supply and a ten-layer, two-ounce copper printed circuit board (PCB); dual vapor chambers, nickel-plated fins, and an optimized center-mounted axial fan (which Huang bragged spins at 3,000rpm) for cooling; and low-profile components and ducted baseplate channels that reduce airflow obstruction to improve the card’s acoustics.
The GTX 690 isn’t cheap at $999 but if you simply have to have one you can start grabbing them in “limited quantity” on May 3 with a full roll-out expected shortly afterwards.
