Asus ENGTX590

Asus GTX 590 Dual-GPU Video Card Review

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. 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.