The GTX 690 Arrives – Exotic Industrial Design takes the Performance Crown!

Overclocking, Power Draw and Temperatures

Overclocking the GTX 690 is just as easy as overclocking the GTX 680.  What is surprising is that we matched the GTX 680 overclock on the core and memory exactly – +150MHz on the core and +550MHz on the memory.  We did not adjust the GTX 690’s voltage.  Temperatures were never an issue and the fan profile remained the same – extraordinarily quiet at maximum load!

We decided to compare our GTX 590 power draw with that of the HD 7970 – both fully overclocked and in the same identical system; the only difference being the video cards.  Both systems idled below 100W testifying to these cards’s excellent power management at idle and Ivy Bridge’s extreme efficiency compared to our older Bloomfield i7-920 system.

Here is the power draw of the entire system with a GTX 690 overclocked as far as we could push it and under full load:

450W is very respectable for a dual-GPU card of this incredibly high performance level!  Now let’s look at an overclocked-to-the-max HD 7970 in the same system under the exact same conditions.  And remember that it takes an overclocked HD 7970 to match the stock performance of a GTX 680.

Radical.  The single-GPU flagship HD 7970 when overclocked and overvolted to match a stock GTX 680 uses 14 more Watts at peak load than the dual-GPU GTX 690 flagship!  As you can see, it will take some real engineering wizardry to match the performance of the GTX 690 with a dual-GPU HD 7990 and there is no doubt that it will require much more power to do so.

Let’s head to the performance charts and graphs to see how the GTX 690 compares with the last generation dual-GPU flagships – the AMD HD 6990 and the Nvidia GTX 590 – as well as the top video cards of this generation, the HD 7970 and the GTX 680.