Hot on the heels of AMD’s Radeon HD 6990 dual-GPU monster, Nvidia is putting the pedal to the metal with its own dual GPU video card. The GTX 590 implements a pair of full GF110 CPUs, each with its own 1.5GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory, all 1,024 shader units and a custom cooler.

Can Asus' implementation of the GTX 590 beat AMD's dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990? Click 'Read More' for the full story!

Palit’s high-end cards tend to be exercises in extravagance. That’s certainly true with its GTX 570 Sonic Platinum. At first, we thought Palit shipped the wrong card, given the 8-pin power connector nestled adjacent to the 6-pin connector, just like a GTX 580. However, it’s really a GTX 570—albeit with a core clock of 800MHz (versus the stock 742MHz) and the GDDR5 frame buffer clocking an even 1GHz (versus the reference 950MHz.)

The GTX 570 is the little brother of Nvidia’s current high-end GTX 580. Like the original GTX 480, the GTX 570 has 480 shader cores active, and 32 disabled. Since it’s based on the GTX 580 GPU, however, Nvidia’s able to run the GTX 570 at a higher clock rate than the GTX 480. On the other hand, the memory controller is 320 bits wide, versus the GTX 480’s 384-bit controller. That’s still wider than the 256-bit memory bus on the Radeon HD 6970.

The Asus TOP edition of the GTX 460 adds its now-familiar DirectCU cooling engine and pushes the clock speed a full 100MHz higher than the stock GTX 460’s 675MHz. That’s a 15 percent overclock. That, plus the 11 percent memory overclock, says as much about the cooler design as the GPU.