The Nvidia Geforce 680 GTX graphics card was only released a couple of months ago, praised as the fastest graphics card in the world. However, Nvidia have now raised the bar, with the release of the Geforce 690 GTX! The new king of speed!
It isn’t a new card in architecture though by any means. Inside the casing reveals 2 680 GTX GPU cores, surrounded by a new fan design to cool the beast, running essentially in SLI formation.
Two of these cards in SLI formation would give you a quad cored GPU, though this would set you back quite a few pounds!
Not for the faint of heart in that case, this card is for the major game player only. One with plenty of money yes, but also one with plenty of space for monitors the size of football grounds! To maximize this card, you would have to be running at extreme resolutions to make up for the amount spent, when one 680 GTX would still out do the competition. Though to be fair, the AMD 7970 is about on par with the 680 GTX power wise, and as we will see later; a lot cheaper too.
So, what are the power drawbacks?
Well, one 680 GTX draws 195 watts at load (the same as one 7970), whereas the 690 GTX draws 300 watts at load. That is certainly slightly better than getting two 680’s and strapping them up. You are saving 90 watts of power there, for the green (not in envy) of you out there.
But as I said, at a price:
£869.63 is the base price for the 690 GTX, whilst you could buy a 680 GTX for £478.42 and still have enough power to run pretty much what you wanted at whatever resolution you wanted.
Still, as with the power draw, if you were really serious about SLIing the 680 GTX, then going for the 690 GTX is the cheaper option, saving you £87.21 in total.
Price effective compared to the competition?
Well, one AMD 6970 GPU (the 680’s rival) will cost you £359.75, and if buying two for SLI useage (the equivilant 690), a total of £719.50.
That is a saving of £118.67 if you prefer the AMD camp for a single card, and a mega saving of £150.13 if you were to buy two vs the 690! As said previously, the power consumption is about on par with Nvidia’s for one card at least, and in terms of game performance, their really isn’t much to go on.
Prices for sure will not drop until AMD release a dual core varient of their 7900 series of cards, or a whole new chip altogether! It would seriously be cheaper in this economic climate however to simply release a dual core chip, but we can be sure they are working on one.
So to conclude, if you prefer Nvidia, go for the 680 GTX. If you prefer AMD, go for the 7970. Even though differences in brute force are there, they are very closely matched.
Of course, if you can afford it, SLI the 7970 up, or simply get a 690 GTX to do it in one go!
I guess we will see in the coming months what AMD have decided to do.
But for now, comments welcome down below as always.
