ASUS nVidia GTX590 Review

ASUS GTX590 Review

Introduction

Putting two GPUs onto a single circuit board is a fairly recent trend for the highest models in a particular graphics card series. Although it had been tested before with varying success it was the GTX295 and ATI HD4870X2 that really proved it was both possible and beneficial to go for SLI/Crossfire but on a single card.

Of course the primary benefit is that you can buy two, and go for a Quad-GPU setup, but there are also energy savings over having two single cards.

Heat however is the largest hurdle to overcome. This has been dealt with either by reducing the performance of the GPUs used, or resorting to something that sounds like a 747 taking off. 

Today we’re looking at the latest attempt from nVidia, the GTX590. It comes at the perfect time as we’ve only just reviewed the AMD HD6990 and so we can really get to grips with which of the two is the King of single card performance.

Without further ado let’s get to it.

Technical Specifications

Product Name

GeForce® GTX 590

GPU

Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 500 series

Engine Clock speed

607 MHz

Unified Shaders

1024 (512 per GPU)

Shader Clock

1215 MHz

Memory Clock speed

3414 MHz

Memory

3072MB DDR5 (1536MB per GPU)

Memory interface

768-bit (384-bit per GPU)

Display Outputs

Triple DL-DVI-I, mini-DP

HDCP

Yes

Cooling

Active (with fan) (dual-slot)

DirectX® version

DirectX® 11 with Shader Model 5.0

Other hardware features

8-channel Digital Surround Sound, HDMI 1.4a compatible, HD Audio bitstream capable, hardware accelerated Blu-ray 3D ready, Quad NVIDIA® SLI™ ready, NVIDIA 3D Vision™ Surround ready

Software Features

nView® Multi-Display, Hardware Video Decode Acceleration Technology, NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology, OpenGL® 4.1,

Windows 7 capability

Windows® 7 with DirectCompute support