NVIDIA unveils GeForce GTX 690

At this weekend's GeForce LAN/NVidia Game Festival 2012, on April 28 in Shanghai, NVidia announced their upcoming dual-GPU flagship card, GeForce GTX 690. With two GK104 cores, the new cards will have a total of 3072 CUDA cores, running almost as fast as the GTX 680. The announcement came during the opening addresses at the festival, attended by over 6000 gamers from across China.

Sporting two full GK104 dies, with a TDP of 300W for the card, the GPU cores are clocked at 915 MHz, with a boosted clock speed of 1019 MHz. This is a drop of a little over 9% against the GTX 680. However, with 2 x 8-pin PCI-E power connection, the card can take up to 375W, giving a decent overclocking potential. The memory clock is unchanged from GTX 680, sitting at 1502 MHz (6008 MHz effective).

The card has 10 power phases (arranged as 5 per GPU) delivering power similar to the GTX 680. As mentioned above, the maximum available power will be 375W, 25% above it's rated TDP. NVidia has allowed for a maximum power target of +35%, with default power usage of 263W (this means the card is designed to be able to safely use 355W of the available 375W without problems).

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Picture: GeForce GTX 690 graphics card, Courtesy of NVidia

Physically, the reference design has a pair of nickel tipped heatsinks (one per GPU), attached to vapor chambers and cooled by a single axial fan. This will push half the heat out the back of the case and half out the back of the card into the case, so adequate ventilation will be essential for all users.

The GTX 690 will be available in retail from May 3rd, with a launch price of $999.