We knew this day would come, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting. After all, we’ve been waiting since Saturday. Today Nvidia launches the just-announced GeForce GTX 690, which packs two full GK104 Kepler GPUs onto one video card—and what a card it is. (For an in-depth look at the GTX 680, the GK104 GPU, and the Kepler architecture, check out the feature story from our June issue!)
With premium magnesium-alloy casing, polycarbonate windows, and an LED-backlit logo, the $1,000 GeForce GTX 690 reference card looks as expensive as it is.
Two. Two GPUs.
The GTX 690 is 11 inches long—big for an Nvidia card, but still smaller than the 12.2-inch high water mark established by the AMD Radeon 5970 a few generations ago. As you’d expect, the GTX 690 contains two of the same GPU found in the GTX 680, with a slightly lower base clock—915MHz with a boost clock of 985MHz, compared to the 1,006MHz base and 1,058MHz boost clock for a reference GTX 680. Nvidia says they’ve built in substantial room for overclocking, too, saying that you can get over 1,100MHz clocks from the stock cooler.
Aside from the slightly lower clocks, the rest of the board’s specs are exactly what you’d expect from a true dual-680 configuration: 3,072 CUDA cores, 16 SMX units, 256 texture units, and 64 ROPs. Each GK104 GPU has 2GB of GDDR5 with four 64-bit memory channels per GPU, for a total of 4GB GDDR5 frame buffer for the whole card.
Click "Read More" for the full specs, benchmarks, and more!
You are, no doubt, quite familiar with Intel’s CPU-release “cadence” of tick-tock by now. If not, the short story is that every tock brings a major breakthrough, while ticks are decent upgrades but nothing to Twitter home about.
