Delivering the keynote address at the GeForce LAN/Nvidia Game Festival in Shanghai, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced the company's new video card, the GeForce GTX 690.
The latest card from the company to use dual GPUs (following the GTX 590, which was released last year), the GTX 690 utilizes the new 28nm Kepler architecture that Nvidia introduced on the GTX 680 last month.
Huang claimed 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."
Foremost among the GTX 690's specs are 3,072 CUDA parallel processing cores, which means the card offers essentially the performance of two GTX 680s, although according to Nvidia the GTX 690 will actually run quieter and with better power efficiency than two GTX 680 cards connected in an SLI configuration. The card would contain 4GB of 6GHz GDDR5 RAM, and support all the other features found on the GTX 680 (such as GPU Boost, which is a style of automatic overclocking similar to the Turbo Boost and Turbo Core on Intel and AMD's CPUs respectively).
Nvidia touted the revamped design of the GTX 690, which includes an exterior frame of trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, which Nvidia says provides excellent strength and durability; a new fan housing constructed from a thixomolded magnesium alloy, for improved heat dissipation and vibration dampening; 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 will be available "in limited quantities" starting May 3, and move to a wider distribution from Nvidia's usual add-in card partners (Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, and others) on May 7. Pricing for the GTX 690 is $999 list.
