[VR-Zone] NVidia GTX-590 *FINAL* Specs Revealed!

[notty22]

The door is open to impress reviewers , from the 'mixed' reviews of the 6990. That might be where Nvidia took their final product.

From Tom's. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6990-antilles-crossfire,2878-15.html

We’re not even talking about maximum power figures here. I’m simply logging three iterations of the built-in Metro 2033 benchmark—something you’d see during everyday game play, rather than a “power bug” like FurMark. On average, the Radeon HD 6990 running with its overclocked BIOS uses 94 W more than a GeForce GTX 480. And the GTX 480 already gets ridiculed for its power consumption!
We’ve seen some elegant high-performance graphics cards from AMD, but this is not one of them. It brute-forces performance like a broadsword through cloth.

So, what does it take to dissipate the heat generated by a 375 W card?
Apparently, it takes a noise chart uglier than sin itself.
The problem is that AMD doesn’t use a graceful ramp. It instead steps fan speed up and down to address thermal demands. As a result, you hear the board’s cooler accelerating and decelerating like an engine when the driver downshifts coming up to a stop light.
There’s no excuse for a graphics card to be this loud and, if spinning its cooling fan up to 3600 RPM is the only way to keep the Radeon HD 6990 from overheating, then this product simply isn’t ready for consumption. Because the problem is related to fan speed, there’s a chance an updated firmware could smooth out the way AMD handles heat. Right now, though, there’s no way I’d install one of these things in a gaming machine.

 

[scooterlibby]

If the 590 falls short of the 6990, will that put downward price pressure on one or both cards? Or, will limited availability keep them at the $700+ level?

 

[Grooveriding]

If the 590 falls short of the 6990, will that put downward price pressure on one or both cards? Or, will limited availability keep them at the $700+ level?

That's the puzzling part of it. From the specs it looks to be slower than a 6990, but it is also rumored to be more expensive.

A retailer up here in Canada has had it listed for sale for a few days now for $800 ?

At that price I don't see it lowering the 6990's price at all. ($700)

 

[Skurge]

That's the puzzling part of it. From the specs it looks to be slower than a 6990, but it is also rumored to be more expensive.

A retailer up here in Canada has had it listed for sale for a few days now for $800 ?

At that price I don't see it lowering the 6990's price at all. ($700)

I don't see how his card is gonna work. If they use 580 cores, they can make more money by selling them as 2 gtx580s for $500 each instead of a 590 for 800. Also, if its going to be faster than a 6990 its going to use more power. (500W+?) Its going to take some engineering to build a card like that. The 6990 already has an amazing PCB, just the cooler can't really keep up with it, even so that cooler is pretty hardcore.

 

[Skurge]

The door is open to impress reviewers , from the 'mixed' reviews of the 6990. That might be where Nvidia took their final product.

From Tom's. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6990-antilles-crossfire,2878-15.html

Yeah, I stopped reading toms after that odd ram article and the crossfire vs SLI article where they declared Crossfire the winner after 4 games.

Toms failed the mention that the 6990 runs cooler than the 480, 470, 580, 570, 6970 and 6950.

 

[badb0y]

The door is open to impress reviewers , from the 'mixed' reviews of the 6990. That might be where Nvidia took their final product.

From Tom's. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6990-antilles-crossfire,2878-15.html

Not to mention it rapes the GTX 480... I'll say this again people ridiculed the GTX 480 because it was loud, hot and power-hungry while being 15% faster than a AMD 5870 at launch, if it was 30% faster than the Amd 5870 no one would really care that it was a power hog.

 

[Grooveriding]

I don't see how his card is gonna work. If they use 580 cores, they can make more money by selling them as 2 gtx580s for $500 each instead of a 590 for 800. Also, if its going to be faster than a 6990 its going to use more power. (500W+?) Its going to take some engineering to build a card like that. The 6990 already has an amazing PCB, just the cooler can't really keep up with it, even so that cooler is pretty hardcore.

That's true. But also remember that the card requires one less PCB, certainly the 590 will have a more complex and expensive to produce PCB than a single 580. I would venture a guess though that the price of two 580 PCBs will cost more than a 590 PCB. Also one 590 only attends one box, one set of accessories etc.

I would also argue that rather than cherry pick the best cores, if it is only clocked at 602, why not use cores that are sub-par to the core you would find on a 580.

 

[Ghiedo27]

Why not use cores that are sub-par to the core you would find on a 580.

They might cherry pick cores to drop the voltage as much as possible for thermal / power constraints. I'm just guessing here, but it seems to me like this process is mature enough that they aren't getting a lot of duds. They've probably had plenty of good cores to fill gtx 580 demand, so I bet they've been stockpiling the cherries to see what they could do with the 590.

 

[AtenRa]

I don't know about you but the 600MHz seams too low for 365-375W

oh well, a couple more days to go

 

[hdfxst]

Don't know how real it is but here is a gpu-z shot and picture of the 590 http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=141427&page=4 post 85

 

[bleucharm28]

is coming out tomorrow right?

 

[hdfxst]

The 22nd or the 24th are the dates being tossed around

 

[Skurge]

Looks like the 590 will have a better fan and could run quieter.

That PCB look mircoscopic compared to the 6990 so It might not have the componants to handle the power demands from 2 highly clocked full GF110 GPUs.

 

[AtenRa]

Impressive if it has dual GF110 at that size.

 

[OCGuy]

Holy crap is looks like it could actually fit in a normal sized case.

 

[tviceman]

Looks like the 590 will have a better fan and could run quieter.

That PCB look mircoscopic compared to the 6990 so It might not have the componants to handle the power demands from 2 highly clocked full GF110 GPUs.

Not necessarily true. Barts chips are way smaller and consume less power than gf104/gf114 but have bigger PCB's.

 

[TerabyteX]

Never understood why AMD and its partners use those large PCB's for such small GPU as Barts. It feels like using an GTX 580 PCB to accomodate a GTX 550 Ti.

Back on topic, with those specs leaks around, it seems that at stock, it will have trouble to stay affloat with the stock HD 6990, seems that the smaller GPU die strategy paid off. 40nm proved to be a nail in the coffin for both GPU vendors though.

 

[GprophetB]

So is tonight the night? The 22nd? It's been really quiet the last few days...

 

[MentalIlness]

So is tonight the night? The 22nd? It's been really quiet the last few days...

I read postponed till the 24th. If you can call "48 hours" postponed.

 

[Skurge]

Never understood why AMD and its partners use those large PCB's for such small GPU as Barts. It feels like using an GTX 580 PCB to accomodate a GTX 550 Ti.

Back on topic, with those specs leaks around, it seems that at stock, it will have trouble to stay affloat with the stock HD 6990, seems that the smaller GPU die strategy paid off. 40nm proved to be a nail in the coffin for both GPU vendors though.

AMD's reference cards are quite a bit more robust than the equavalent nvidia card. Some say over engineered. That also could be the reason you don't see many non refence card as early, it just might be that bit harder to improve from the refence design.

GTX460 1GB Cyclone

Reference 6870

 

[MrK6]

I thought the 8-pin connectors being "rated" at 150W each was more of a guideline than an actual spec.

Didn't someone here mention in an earlier thread that the connectors are electrically rated to function just fine up to 300W or 500W each?

Provided the PSU is spec'ed to deliver the power, and the video card has been designed to manage the power (and heat) then it's not entirely clear to me what the concern would be or should be other than it just being a question of "does my PSU and case support such a video card's electrical and cooling needs, and do I want a card that requires as much?".

IIRC, each 12V wire is rated for 75W, and there's three per connector, so technically each connector is good for 225W. So the board is geared for 75W (PCIe slot) + 225W + 225W power consumption = 525W total power consumption. However, it's important to note here that this is an actual hardware limitation, and extreme overclocks, which will definitely pull more than that, will actually be dangerous. The fact that a "factory" overclocked 6990 (via AUSUM BIOS) consumes ~440W does not leave a lot of headroom.

So I ran the two benchmarks I could that would mirror Anandtech's benchmark results, Metro 2033 and Crysis Warhead.

Thanks for the info, it's extremely helpful :thumbsup:. There looks to be a significant deficit there. If you have time, would it be possible to bench one of your GTX 480's at those speeds to we can look at scaling? I wonder if the reduce clocks would also effect that.

The door is open to impress reviewers , from the 'mixed' reviews of the 6990. That might be where Nvidia took their final product.

From Tom's. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6990-antilles-crossfire,2878-15.html

"Mixed reviews" is one review to you? [H] seems to disagree:

Overall, we have a better impression of the AMD Radeon HD 6990 now. If you are looking for an all-in-one dual-GPU package, this is it right now. It offers a power efficient design, and performance that is astonishing for this price.

The point is, the 6990 offers currently unparalleled performance in a single card, and is actually quite power efficient:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/Radeon_HD_6990/23.html
You'll notice that the 6990 is still more power efficient than any card offered by NVIDIA @ 2560x1600 (and if you're buying a 6990 to play at a lesser resolution, "you're doing it wrong"). Its main problem is noise, which by all reports is ungodly.

Looks like the 590 will have a better fan and could run quieter.

That PCB look mircoscopic compared to the 6990 so It might not have the componants to handle the power demands from 2 highly clocked full GF110 GPUs.

That is impressive if NVIDIA pulls it off :thumbsup:. The axial style fan will most certainly be quieter than AMD's radial design. It's interesting how tables have turned this time: the GTX580 might end up being a decent second place card if it's quieter and performs only a bit slower. Also, the smaller footprint is more than enough to win some over. Very interesting .

 

[bleucharm28]

i wonder how people are going SLi?

 

[acx]

8 pin pcie power connector provides total of 150W.

Pcie 2.0 provides 150W through the pcie slot.

 

[MrK6]

8 pin pcie power connector provides total of 150W.

Pcie 2.0 provides 150W through the pcie slot.

These are two common misconceptions. The 8-pin PCIE power connector is rated for 150W (as a spec), but it can put out much more. As I already stated, the wires in it are certified for 75W each, for a total of 225W, and can probably push a little more before they get too hot. This is probably why AMD doesn't warranty the 6990's AUSUM mode, since it forces the card to run out of spec.

The PCIE 2.0 slot also does not provide 150W of power. This is a common error that was spread and I guess is still floating around two+ years later. The PCIe 1.1 and PCIe 2.0 power deliver is the same as the slots are the same. You can negotiate higher speeds across data pins but there's no way to (safely) push more power across the same power pins.

 

[Grooveriding]

Asian site had a review up and pulled it. Core clock = 607Mhz.

http://translate.googleusercontent....gle.ca&usg=ALkJrhhWX6pStAwx1DWo_Vyrr5-v2OHgqA