Just after the release of AMD’S Radeon HD 6990 4GB which happened 3 weeks back , NVIDIA is now launching a new product, the Geforce GTX 590 3GB. NVIDIA said it could have launched the same earlier but revised the technology. Well, the wait was worth it. Earlier, Radeon HD 6990 4GB had abrasive acoustics which left users dissatisfied but now, Geforce is more elegant and has better features.
Usually, NVIDIA has models which get heated up fast and consume a lot of power but this model offers quietness too. NVIDIA claims it put two on a single PCS and did not out scream AMD’s dual-Cayman based card. But this has caused certain problems like using the same mid-mounted fan design which was not well accepted in earlier models. Also, the thermal regulators have been taken out and the card uses a lot more power.
One advantage is that it’s the quietest dual-GPU board. But this is rather seen as a peculiarity. Due to the simple reason that hot cards usually make a lot of noise, critics doubt that NVIDIA has compromised on the quality of some features to achieve this noiseless effect.
NVIDIA has also used two GF110 processors. Uncut processors use four graphics processing clusters, each with four streaming multiprocessors. There are 32 CUDA cores in each SM which makes it 5512 cores per GPU. Each SM has four texturing units, yielding 64 to the whole chip. Also, there is one polymorph engine per SM.
There are six ROP partitions at the back-end of the GPU. Each partition is capable of an output of 48 pixels per clock. The 384-bit memory is divided into a sextet of 64-bit interfaces. All six stops have 256MB of GDDR5 memory which is 1.5GB of memory per GPU. Thus, Geforce GTX 590 has a total memory of 3GB.
In addition to that, GTX 590’s processors are tied to NVIDIA’s NF200 bridge which uses a single 16-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface and multiplexes it out to two 16-lane paths—one for each GPU.
However, unlike GTX 580 which uses 772 MHz graphics and 1002 MHz memory clock , for GTX590 it gets slowed down to 607 MHz and 853 MHz respectively. Due to these reasons, it downplays its own expectations.
Thus GTX 590 which was internally named “Gemini” has given NVIDIA a decent comeback in the dual GPU market.
