GEFORCE GTX 690

After the recent launch of the GeForce GTX 680, NVIDIA is introducing a video card based on the Kepler architecture (you can read more about this architecture in the GeForce GTX 680 review) with two GK104 processors. NVIDIA already has experience in developing dual-chip solutions - GeForce GTX 295 and GTX 590, but due to limited power consumption, these models had very low operating frequencies, which greatly affected the performance results. The release of the GeForce GTX 690 can be called a huge step in the direction of dual-chip solutions, because... Thanks to the latest manufacturing technologies and the new Kepler architecture, the GeForce GTX 690 includes two full-fledged video chips.

Technical specifications

• Code name of the chips is GK104;
• 28nm production technology;
• 3.54 billion transistors in each chip;
• Core area 294 mm2 per chip;
• Unified architecture with an array of processors for stream processing of various types of data: vertices, pixels, etc.;
• Hardware support for DirectX 11 API, including Shader Model 5.0, geometry and compute shaders, as well as tessellation;
• Dual 256-bit memory bus: four independent controllers per chip, 64-bit wide each, with support for GDDR5 memory;
• Base core frequency 915 MHz 
• Core frequency at Boost Clock 1019 MHz 
• 2×8 streaming multiprocessors, including a total of 3072 scalar ALUs for floating point calculations (support for calculations in integer format, floating point, with FP32 and FP64 precision within the IEEE 754-2008 standard);
• 2x128 texture addressing and filtering units with support for FP16 and FP32 components in textures and support for trilinear and anisotropic filtering for all texture formats;
• 2x4 wide ROP units (all 64 pixels) with support for anti-aliasing modes up to 32 samples per pixel, including FP16 or FP32 frame buffer format. Each block consists of an array of configurable ALUs and is responsible for generating and comparing Z, MSAA, blending;
• Integrated support for RAMDAC, two Dual Link DVI ports, as well as HDMI and DisplayPort.
• Integrated support for four monitors, including two Dual Link DVI ports, as well as HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2
• PCI Express 3.0 bus support
• Number of universal processors 2×1536;
• Number of texture blocks – 2×128, blending blocks – 2×32;
• Effective memory frequency 6008 (1502×4) MHz;
• Memory type GDDR5, 2×256-bit memory bus;
• Memory capacity 2×2 GB;
• Memory bandwidth 2×192.3 GB/s;
• Theoretical maximum fill rate is 58.6 gigapixels per second;
• Theoretical texture sampling speed is 234.2 gigatexels per second;
• Three Dual Link DVI-I connectors, one DisplayPort;
• Single SLI connector;
• PCI Express 3.0 bus;
• Power consumption 300 W 
• Two-slot design;

Like its predecessor GTX 680, the GTX 690 also supports the latest PCI-E 3 standard. NVIDIA positions the GTX 690 as the equivalent of a pair of two GTX 680s, this can be judged both by performance and by the price factor. The recommended retail price for the GTX 690 is $999, the cost of one GTX 680 video card is $499.

Design

The design of the GTX 690 is as follows: the cooling system shroud is made entirely of metal and magnesium alloy, the radiator GPU made of chromed aluminum. In terms of board dimensions, the GTX 690 is only one inch larger than the GTX 680 board, and is 11 inches. On the upper end of the video card casing is a glow-in-the-dark GeForce logo with a soft-touch effect, applied using a laser.

The principle of the cooling system in the GTX 690 is almost the same as that of its younger brother, the GeForce GTX 590. Cooling of two GPU is carried out by two separate radiators with a copper evaporation chamber. In the center of the cooling system, a large axial fan with a large-diameter impeller is installed, accelerating the air to the sides. To increase the efficiency of cooling and reduce noise from the fan, the cooling system casing was designed - special low-profile channels are designed directly under the fan to direct the air flow to the radiators.

NVIDIA engineers also improved the fan control logic; its rotation speed changes smoothly, rather than step by step.

There are 3 DVI ports and one DisplayPort on the back of the video card.

Plateau

The GTX 690 graphics card uses a 10-layer board. All memory chips are installed on one side of the board.

Like the previous dual-chip GeForce GTX 590, the GTX 690 uses Samsung K4G20325FD-FC03 memory chips. The effective operating frequency of the memory is the same as that of the GTX 680 - 6 GHz. The video card's power supply system has five phases for each GPUAll capacitors on the GTX 690 board are solid state.

For overclocking settings we used MSI Afterburner. As you can see from the screenshot below, we managed to achieve overclocking to a frequency of +100 MHz for the core and up to +500 MHz for the memory.

At these frequencies, we get a card with higher performance than two GeForce GTX 680s, while maintaining comfortable temperature and noise characteristics corresponding to the unoverclocked GeForce GTX 690. There is simply no point in overclocking more - this performance will satisfy all existing needs.

19000 parrots GPU - an incredible record at home has become a reality...