AfterDawn: News

NVIDIA releases $1000 GeForce GTX 690

Nvidia has announced this weekend the availability of the world's fastest consumer graphics card, the Geforce GTX 690.

The card is powered by dual Kepler architecture-based GeForce GPUs and has a new "industrial design."



CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang made the announcement at the NVIDIA Game Festival in Shanghai, and it came as a surprise to many who expected the card to be released later in the year.

The company notes the "exterior frame is made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, providing excellent strength and durability and the fan housing is made from a thixomolded magnesium alloy, which offers excellent heat dissipation and vibration dampening."

Overall, the GTX 690 is powered by 3,072 NVIDIA CUDA cores and the card can deliver close to double the frame rates of the closest single GPU product, the GTX 680. The card is also said to be more power efficient and certainly quieter than its predecessors.

Adds Brian Kelleher, senior vice president of GPU engineering at NVIDIA: "The GTX 690 is truly a work of art -- gorgeous on the outside with amazing performance on the inside. Gamers will love playing on multiple screens at high resolutions with all the eye candy turned on. And they'll relish showing their friends how beautiful the cards look inside their systems."

Starting on May 3rd, the GTX 690 will be available on a limited basis with a full rollout on the 7th. The powerful hardware will not be cheap and will lighten up your wallet by $999.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 29 Apr 2012 19:58

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• 9 comments

• hearme0

  MYeah.....way to stay "practical" and competitive Nvidia.......NOT!
  
  Who the f would buy a card that claims this kind of "durability"?? My XFX cards don't fall apart and are super quiet. This will sell to neurotic egghead losers. What a damn waste! Bet my ass this will NOT sell, especially in this economy.

  29.4.2012 20:32 #1

• SomeBozo

  do yourself a favor, avoid nvidia.
  

  30.4.2012 00:02 #2

• Steel-Ice

  I prefer Nvidia over ATI, but lately cost vs performance ATI has been edging them out.
  

  30.4.2012 01:05 #3

• grathan

  I bought a $750 card when I built my computer. It was so big it covered up 3 other slots on the motherboard and required a custom height cpu fan. It was so hot it could cook an egg (consumed like 400 watts at idle). The computer crahsed every time it booted. Built a computer the other day with onboard graphics and will never buy a graphics card again.

  30.4.2012 09:45 #4

• SomeBozo

  Originally posted by grathan: I bought a $750 card when I built my computer. It was so big it covered up 3 other slots on the motherboard and required a custom height cpu fan. It was so hot it could cook an egg (consumed like 400 watts at idle). The computer crahsed every time it booted. Built a computer the other day with onboard graphics and will never buy a graphics card again. You have a great point if it meets your needs. I think we would agree games have and will always drive the need for better and better graphic cards. That said if you don't do e-mail an other stuff one your machine, compared with an on board integrated graphics card, to get an AT1 or nvld1a you'll be over building and throwing money away. But if you play games then you still need one of these beasts.
  
  A couple months ago i built a new system with the latest and greatest 2700k i7. For a week or two I used the on board graphics card, for normal stuff, Word, e-mail, Visual Studio, SQL, (ya i'm a developer and geek ;) everything seemed perfectly fine. But i'm a gamer too and compared the windows performance index jumped from 5.2 up to 7.6 with an AT1 7900. Strange to see now the memory and CPU are the limiting factors at 7.6, the index number for the graphics card is 7.9. HAHA Crazy.
  
  All the best, take care.
  
  
  
  

  30.4.2012 11:07 #5

• bobiroc

  Does this also turn your computer into an EZ Bake Oven?
  
  Sorry, but as fast as video cards advance I rather sacrifice a few FPS, save hundreds of dollars, and have a video card that can fit nicely inside a modest case. Then in a couple years maybe do the same with what new technology brings.
  

  AMD Phenom II 965 @ 3.67Ghz, 8GB DDR3, ATI Radeon 5770HD, 300GB 10,000RPM Raptor, 2TB Additional HDD, Windows 7 Ultimate.
  
  http://www.facebook.com/BlueLightningTechnicalServices

  30.4.2012 19:53 #6

• LordRuss

  Funny how this card costs virtually the same as the rest of the components. well, if you were going with a middle of the road AMD based system anyway... but then you would have probably smoked the equivalent weight of hash to put one of these cards in said machine in the first place as well.
  
  Personally, the most I've ever spent on a video card was probably $300 & I almost felt guilty for having spent that. I take that back... I spent $230 for 2 SLI cards ($460 total), but haven't exactly felt the need to upgrade 'quite' yet.
  
  Of coarse that may very well change seeing as the new Max Payne & Diablo 3 are due out, but I can also deal with it. $1000 can buy just enough gasoline to get me to the discount store to pick up those two titles...
  

  http://onlyinrussellsworld.blogspot.com

  2.5.2012 11:31 #7

• SmaryJerry (unverified)

  Originally posted by LordRuss: Funny how this card costs virtually the same as the rest of the components. well, if you were going with a middle of the road AMD based system anyway... but then you would have probably smoked the equivalent weight of hash to put one of these cards in said machine in the first place as well.
  
  Personally, the most I've ever spent on a video card was probably $300 & I almost felt guilty for having spent that. I take that back... I spent $230 for 2 SLI cards ($460 total), but haven't exactly felt the need to upgrade 'quite' yet.
  
  Of coarse that may very well change seeing as the new Max Payne & Diablo 3 are due out, but I can also deal with it. $1000 can buy just enough gasoline to get me to the discount store to pick up those two titles... I've always used SLI as an upgrade rather than a starting component. I feel its better to go with a faster card then in 2 years when the price drops you greatly increase your speed by getting 1 more of the same card at a cheaper price.

  2.5.2012 16:20 #8

• bhetrick

  Originally posted by hearme0: MYeah.....way to stay "practical" and competitive Nvidia.......NOT!
  What does offering THE top end card have to do with "staying practical and competitive"?
  
  Maybe you're new to the internet, or you merely don't think before posting, but Nvidia does offer more than the 690.
  
  
  

  4.5.2012 12:47 #9