Nvidia GeForce GTX 590 3 GB Review: Firing Back With 1024 CUDA Cores

[srgess]

[citation][nom]bernardv[/nom]6990 is faster but blah blah ... blah blah Nvidia wins???Sorry, 6990 is faster and it wins. Performance per Watt and overall speed should be deciding factors. They show whos chips are best. There will be lots of versions of 6990 with various cooling solutions and different noise levels. Anyway, when you compare two such race horses, noise is not a deciding factor. Non of the top end cards will ever be a rational purchase.[/citation]

Id say both card are equal overall, power, sound, games benchmark, would like to see an video encoding test. Price will determine the winner ( Performance per $ ) not Performance per watt. Honestly there around 30Watts difference i dont think so this will bother any gamer interesting in those card anyway. If you have the money to buy this, you have the money to buy a power supply and pay off electricity bill easy. Your prob the guy that buy a ferrari with walmart tire right.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]warezme[/nom]I think one major aspect of this whole review was missed. These cards should have been tested in a 3 monitor display setup. After all, isn't that what they are intended for? I have 2 GTX295+'s from EVGA that I have been pushing at stock 280 speeds for several years in Quad-SLI. They do a grand job for what they are, however, when I upgraded to Surround Vision on 3 monitors I started getting some game glitchiness, not in running the games but in how the screens switched. Sometimes one screen would go out and only display on the other two. Having to divide the surround mode between two different cards caused some kind of synchronization problem. That is why I was excited about the 590 as now I could run all three monitors off one card and get better performance to boot. These are the kinds of issues the real enthusiast will run into because quite frankly if you are gaming one of these cards on a single monitor, unless its an uber expensive one, you just wasted your money.[/citation]

They were; read the story ;-)

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]scrumworks[/nom]Where were the audio samples when GTX480 launched? Audio was NOT important factor back then but now its all the sudden deal breaker important because nvidia card produces less noise this time. Noise can be handled better with aftermarket coolers that WILL be available sooner or later if that is a problem for ultra-enthusiast gamers.Bottom line is that GTX590 slower than HD6990 and consumes more power. Kudos for nvidia for good effort but I think AMD should earn some honest respect for besting market leader nvidia's solution here. Perhaps some non-biased person like Thomas Soderstrom could handle these new card reviews in the future.[/citation]

This was specifically requested in the 6990 story, as were several other additions, and I'm delivering. Sorry if they don't fit your agenda!

 

[AMD_pitbull]

I love reading new card reviews on each site, you can always tell which company the site prefers, just as clearly as the fanboys that comment on them. Am I bashing? No. Everyone has a preference in everything. Even if you don't consider yourself part of the Green, Red or Blue team, you always have a preference. Bravo to Nvidia if they keep the price on par with the 6990. If not, I'm sorry, but, 6990 would be clear winner, IMO. Of course, unless all you care about is noise. In that case, I'm hoping, if you're willing to spend 700+ on a video card, that you'd buy a sound-deadening case?

Anyways, overall, fun review to read. I look forward to the 7k and 600 series.

Cheers

 

[wolfram23]

I'm a bit surprised at the sub 600W power usage. Pretty cool.

 

[Guest]

Fun article.

If people are going to bring up water cooling, you have to consider overclocking. The GTX 590 may arguably come out ahead in that respect because it's cores can be pushed much further since they are essentially clocked down GTX 580 cores, but that statement may in fact be flawed; Nvidia could have allocated the GTX 580 GPUs that couldn't reach the GTX 580 clockrates to the GTX 590, so overclocking would be less than spectacular in that scenario.

The fact that I used the Nvidia card as an example is irrelevant; the point being, it's dangerous to make assumptions.

 

[luc2k]

Fun article.

If people are going to bring up water cooling, you have to consider overclocking. The GTX 590 may arguably come out ahead in that respect because it's cores can be pushed much further since they are essentially clocked down GTX 580 cores, but that statement may in fact be flawed; Nvidia could have allocated the GTX 580 GPUs that couldn't reach the GTX 580 clockrates to the GTX 590, so overclocking would be less than spectacular in that scenario.

The fact that I used the Nvidia card as an example is irrelevant; the point being, it's dangerous to make assumptions.

Funny thing about assumptions, the card blew up in the techpowerup review while overvolting, looks like the safety failed.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_590/26.html

 

[stectacular]

Chris -- on behalf of triple head gamers thank you so much for the multi-monitor testing! The GTX 590 and AMD 6990 comparison was great.

 

[zak_mckraken]

Excellent comment Khushrenada529. We can assume the GTX 590 will have a high OC potential, but that remains to be proven. I'm sure we'll see people trying to push the card's limits soon enough and I'll make sure to see how it turns out. I'll admit I have a slight bias towards AMD, but that's only because I support the "underdog" in order to have a healthy competition, thus healthy prices.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]stectacular[/nom]Chris -- on behalf of triple head gamers thank you so much for the multi-monitor testing! The GTX 590 and AMD 6990 comparison was great.[/citation]

Very welcome! Several of the additions to this story were direct responses to things readers asked for in the 6990 piece! If you want to see more of that, join in on Twitter, and when I tease the story a couple of weeks ahead of time and ask for requests, let me know what you'd like to see =)

 

[xenorage]

Chris thanks again for the great review... And thank you for including the sound comparisons in video format, it really drives home the fact that the 6990 is loud. I work on an airfield and when the video got to the end I could hear it clearly above the Blackhawk doing ground test a 100 yards away.

Either way both companies were hamstrung with the 40nm process and I appreciate the dual gpu cards for their engineering, however like you said just buy 2 6970/6950 or 2 570/560 to get a better deal.

 

[mrmotion]

I find it funny that when the 480 came out and stomped everything, people said that it sucked because power usage and sound. Now the 590 comes out and is a little slower and it still sucks because its quieter and uses a barely more power? Slightly lost here. Im calling this contest a draw.

 

[need4speeds]

I have a early radeon 4870. It too has that same orange-red blower fan.
I think you can get a aftermarket replacement fan that is better.
It is a noisy fan with a higher pitched fan noise.

Wouldn't the 590 clock to stock 580 speeds with water cooling? At those speeds it would be even faster. Water cooling still seems like the best option for both cards. I wonder why they don't offer a water blocked version?

 

[mikenygmail]

Nevertheless, in a comparison between GeForce GTX 590 versus Radeon HD 6990, Nvidia wins.

Correction: Nevertheless, in a comparison between the noise levels of GeForce GTX 590 versus Radeon HD 6990, Nvidia wins.

In a comparison between the performance of GeForce GTX 590 versus Radeon HD 6990, AMD wins.

In a comparison between the power consumption of GeForce GTX 590 versus Radeon HD 6990, AMD wins.

Let's be fair, shall we?

 

[chim64]

i was wondering if you could add the evga gtx460 2win card in the mix for more a price over performance benchmark. Evga states that the card is fast then the gtx580 and for the price i would love to see it go toe to toe with the 590 and 6990.


Core Clock Speed: 700MHz
CUDA Cores: 672
Memory Clock Speed: 3600MHz
Memory Bandwidth: 230.4GB/sec
Shader Clock Speed: 1400MHz
Bus: PCI-E 2.0
Interface: DVI-I, DVI-I, DVI-I, Mini-HDMI
Product Warranty: Limited Lifetime warranty upon registration

I understand as for speeds its not that close but as for a price for a dual gpu card would be nice to see some comparisons in some real world games/apps instead of just trusting evgas word for it.

 

[silverblue]

[citation][nom]need4speeds[/nom]I have a early radeon 4870. It too has that same orange-red blower fan. I think you can get a aftermarket replacement fan that is better. It is a noisy fan with a higher pitched fan noise. Wouldn't the 590 clock to stock 580 speeds with water cooling? At those speeds it would be even faster. Water cooling still seems like the best option for both cards. I wonder why they don't offer a water blocked version?[/citation]

A few review sites have killed their 590s when messing with the voltage. I think it's a simple case of YMMV as Anandtech were far luckier than Techpowerup, for example. The curse of the early adopter, perhaps.

The potential is definitely there, whether you can truly reach it is down to whether the card itself can actually handle it. NVIDIA is imposing limits in their drivers so that's another stumbling block, though some bright spark may be able to shift those in no time at all.

 

[srgess]

gtx 590 win hand down for gpu, memory clock per performance ratio. Downclock 6990 for equal benchmark. amd still fail !

 

[Guest]

Hi Tom.

There's one (pretty important) point that was (almost completely) missed out.
6990 and gtx590 are very attractive from point of parallel computing,
since in one case with 3 pcie slots potentially can be installed actually 6 processors and overall number of flops should be nice.

And from this point what actually is expected from Hardware site is to get technical information of what the configuration should be if to install 1, 2 or three 6990/gtx590.
Personally I don't think that heat is a problem at all for such users even for an ordinary case, since keeping case open and having one small table electrical fan directed to the cards completely solves the problem.

What I am personally interested in are the following two questions:
(1) how many power supply units it would require to work stably, for instance 1200+600, or 800+800, and
(2) would be it enough to just lay one power unit beside pc case, connect separately to electrical network and use it exclusively for one of the cards.

Key point here is that Tesla gpus cost a dozen of times more while provide much lesser computing power than dual-gpu Fermi cards,
so from point of price/efficiency it could be very cool stuff.

I did not build or use ever such systems, but plan in future, and many enthusiasts and educational institutions would find such instructions very useful, since such system would cost around 4k, while it could be the price just of one Tesla board of efficiency comparable to one gtx570.

Behavior of such system with max game load should be comparable to max load in parallel computing tasks, so gaming tests to measure power consumption etc. from this point should be enough.

It will be nice if you touch the question from this point also.
Thanks in advance.

 

[megamanx00]

The GTX 590 can't claim to be the outright winner so it seems it just depends on what games you play and if you're using more than one monitor (which you really should with either of those cards, especially with two of them). The 6990 sounds like a vacuum cleaner though. AMD really needs to let AIBs design their own, hopefully quieter 6990s, otherwise I'd favor the GTX 590 just on that. Either card is a monster though :O

 

[silverblue]

[citation][nom]srgess[/nom]gtx 590 win hand down for gpu, memory clock per performance ratio. Downclock 6990 for equal benchmark. amd still fail ![/citation]

How about... drop the 590's memory bandwidth down from 384-bit to 256-bit? Drop the 590 shader clocks down from 1215MHz to 880MHz? Wait... you can't do either of those.

Both architectures are fundamentally different so you can't compare clock speeds.

 

[kikireeki]

Actually, it is very disappointing! It is an ok card, but no where near the hype they made of it.

 

[UnrealChrisG]

Who cares about noise? Don't most people use headphones to game anyways? I crank up all my fans max and overclock everything, without my headphones it sounds like a vacuum cleaner. But I could care less because I either have music on or I am gaming. But that is just me, I'm sure there is some people out there who use speakers, so the noise could be an issue. But if you really cared about noise just go with water cooling or just don't get such a powerfull card.

 

[Chetou]

It sure doesn't look like it has much overclocking headroom, with many reports of cards blowing up. That, performance and power usage aren't something that 3rd party cards can change, while noise is.

 

[Chetou]

And the conclusion is a new low for Tomshardware.

 

[silverblue]

Wow... it's all gone so quiet.

So... who's buying one?