Yesterday Nvidia officially unveiled its new ultra high-end graphics card, the GeForce GTX 590, claiming it to be “the most powerful DirectX 11 graphics card ever built”, as well as the quietest dual GPU graphics card ever built.
As expected , the GTX 590 crams two GTX 580 GPUs into a single enclosure. Altogether, the GTX 590 boasts 1,024 CUDA core, 94 ROPs and 3GB of GDDR 5 RAM. Perhaps a little disapointingly, the two GTX 580 chips are each clocked at a modest 607 MHz while the shader clocks are pegged at 1.2GHz and the memory at 3.4GHz. The lower clock speeds are thought to have been imposed to keep the card’s power requirements within the realms of sanity, however, the end result according to numerous benchmarks and reviews is a card which is beaten marginally for performance by AMD’s dual GPU monster – the Radeon HD 6990.
On the flip side, reviewers have marvelled at how quiet the card runs for a dual GPU solution.
Local pricing and availability
It is notoriously difficult to get official word from Nvidia regarding South African pricing and availability, and distributors are usually left to their own devices to get the cards into SA.
However, we put out a few feelers to local retailers and distributors, and managed to get feedback from LandmarkPC, who was able to confirm the local price for the EVGA GTX 590 at R7,389. According to LandmarkPC, the card will be in stock on Friday 8 April, 2011.
Prophecy.co.za was unable to provide feedback on local pricing and availability just yet, but is planning on getting the cards in stock over the coming weeks.
AMD’s competing HD 6990 carries a local recomended retail price of R7,300, however, the Club 3D version can be found for around R6,600 online. For now, this makes it cheaper than the GTX 590, and with the consensus being that the HD 6990 outperforms the GTX 590, AMD looks to have the upper hand at this stage.
Of course, as more manufacturer models become available in the country over the coming weeks we can expect to see some movement on the pricing, and with Nvidia and AMD both likely to spend the next few months tweaking drivers, it remains to be seen which card will end up winning this generation’s ultra high-end war.
Join our GTX 590 discussion thread in the forums
