Nvidia launches GTX 690, world's fastest graphics card…for now

NVIDIA yesterday announced their GeForce GTX 690, which is touted to be the world's fastest consumer graphics card, at the moment. The card sports a bold industrial design and is powered by dual Kepler architecture-based GeForce GPUs, the GTX 690 is meticulously designed - inside and out - to deliver the most refined, elegant and smooth PC gaming experience possible. The surprise announcement was made by NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang during his keynote address at the NVIDIA Game Festival in Shanghai. There’s no denying that Nvidia have designed an incredibly sexy looking card for a reference design,which means board partners need not speed too much time on re-designing the cooler, simply slap on a sticker and you’re good to go. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 GPU will be available in limited quantities, starting May 3, 2012, with wider availability by May 7, 2012 from NVIDIA's add-in card partners, including ASUS, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Inno3D, MSI, Palit and Zotac. The expected pricing is $999 (48,950).

Amazing design

Engineered to reach a new threshold in gaming performance, the GTX 690 also looks the part. Its array of innovative technologies is complemented by sleek materials that contribute to the exotic design of the card, including:

• An exterior frame made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, providing excellent strength and durability
• A fan housing made from a thixomolded magnesium alloy, which offers excellent heat dissipation and vibration dampening
• High-efficiency power delivery with less resistance, lower power and less heat generated using a 10-phase, heavy-duty power supply with a 10-layer, two-ounce copper printed circuit board
• Efficient cooling using dual vapor chambers, a nickel-plated finstack and center-mounted axial fan with optimized fin pitch and air entry angles
• Low-profile components and ducted baseplate channels for unobstructed airflow, minimizing turbulence and improving acoustic quality

SLI anyone?

The GTX 690 is powered by a total of 3,072 NVIDIA CUDA cores for ultra-high-resolution gaming and multimonitor NVIDIA Surround configurations, the card delivers close to double the frame rates of the closest single GPU product, the GTX 680. Plus, it is more power efficient and quieter when compared to systems equipped with two GTX 680 cards running in NVIDIA SLI configuration. The GTX 690 graphics card is designed using GeForce GPUs based on NVIDIA's 28-nanometer Kepler architecture, following the introduction late last month of the GTX 680.