The Asus GTX 590 takes on the AMD Radeon HD 6990 in a battle of the dual GPU cards. Win, lose or dead heat? We put them to the test.
Hot on the heels of AMD’s Radeon HD 6990 dual-GPU monster, Nvidia is putting the pedal to the metal with its own dual GPU video card. The GTX 590 implements a pair of full GF110 CPUs, each with its own 1.5GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory, all 1,024 shader units and a custom cooler. There are, however, some compromises. The core clocks are set to 607MHz—substantially down from the 772MHz of the reference GTX 580 or the 787MHz of the eVGA GTX 580 SC. Memory clocks are lower, too, at 853.5MHz versus 1,002MHz on the stock GTX 580. The lower memory clock is mitigated somewhat by the 384-bit wide memory bus.The Asus GTX 590 is 11 inches of dual GPU performance.
We’ve gotten our hands on Asus’ retail version of the GTX 590, which runs at essentially stock speed. Nvidia put some serious engineering effort into the cooling solution for the GTX 590. Like the HD 6990, the GTX 590 uses a central fan surrounded by dual heat sinks. The company estimates the card to be roughly 6dB quieter than the HD 6990 at full load. We could certainly hear the fan spin up significantly during benchmark testing, but it was never annoyingly loud. Even with the quieter cooling solution, the card is just 11 inches long – a full inch shorter than the HD 6990. That said, anyone who’d buy a dual GPU card understands the need for a large chassis with robust cooling. So the length of the card is less important than it might seem, but the lower noise levels are definitely a plus.
The 165MHz reduction in the GTX 590’s core clocks compared to a single GTX 580 is pretty hefty—especially considering the Radeon HD 6990’s two GPUs run at just 50MHz slower than a single 6970. Even then, AMD offers a one-button solution to pump clock speeds back up to single-card territory, albeit at the risk of the user. We tested the GTX 590 against a single GPU GTX 580 and the Radeon HD 6990 reference card running at default (not overclocked) speeds. The GTX 580 is the most muscular single GPU card available. Will dual Fermis, even at substantially lowered clock speeds, crush the AMD solution?
Surprise, surprise: it’s pretty much a dead heat. If anything, the HD 6990 fares better, with wins in six of twelve benchmarks and tying in two more. When the GTX 590 wins, though, it generally wins by big margins.
Power consumption is interesting, too. Both cards need dual 8-pin PCIe connectors, but the GTX 590 is more power hungry than the HD 6990 reference card, both at idle and full throttle. It’s clear from the power consumption numbers why Nvidia needed to drop the core clocks so much: pushing clock speeds much higher might result in a power supply meltdown. Asus will ship their GTX 590 with the SmartDoctor overvolting utility, but we didn’t get it in time for our tests. Given that the card already needs dual 8-pin connectors and sucks vast amounts of current at full load, the thought of pushing the card gives us the willies.
Nvidia fans who have been craving triple monitor goodness with a single card finally get their wish with the GTX 590, though. Three dual-link DVI and one mini-DisplayPort connector are built into the rear bracket.
Finally, three monitors from one Nvidia card, though it took two GPUs to deliver it.
We also briefly tested stereoscopic performance with an Asus 120Hz LCD display. Even with two GPUs and 3GB of video RAM, performance was mixed. We hit the 60fps cap with Far Cry 2, but Just Cause 2 dropped below 30fps and Metro 2033 ran in the low teens. You’ll need to crank down some features if you want to run in stereoscopic mode.In the end, the GTX 590 seems somehow unfinished, as if it were rushed out to respond to AMD’s HD 6990. It’s not quite as speedy in many games as the HD 6990, though it certainly performs well. It’s quieter and a little more compact, which are also positives. But when you’re spending this kind of cash on a high end card, raw speed may matter more than good manners.
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