NVIDIA officially announced the ultra-premium GeForce GTX 690 dual-GPU graphics card at the NVIDA Gaming Festival 2012 in Shanghai, China. The new video card is powered by dual 28-nanometer Kepler architecture-based GeForce GPUs (GK104) and features an exterior frame made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum for greater durability, a new fan housing made from a thixomolded magnesium alloy for better heat dissipation along with a more efficent cooling system based on dual vapor chambers.

The GTX 690 is powered by a total of 3,072 NVIDIA CUDA cores and has been designed for the discriminating gamer and ultra-high-resolution, multimonitor NVIDIA Surround configurations. Nvidia claims that the GTX 690 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 features two fully enabled GK104 GPUs (1536 CUDA cores) clocked at 915MHz, paired with 4GB of 6GHz GDDR5 (2GB per GPU) all on a single card. The GPU boost target will be 1019MHz.

	GTX 690	GTX 680	GTX 590	GTX 580
Stream Processors	2 x 1536	1536	2 x 512	512
Texture Units	2 x 128	128	2 x 64	64
ROPs	2 x 32	32	2 x 48	48
Core Clock	915MHz	1006MHz	607MHz	772MHz
Shader Clock	N/A	N/A	1214MHz	1544MHz
Boost Clock	1019MHz	1058MHz	N/A	N/A
Memory Clock	6.008GHz GDDR5	6.008GHz GDDR5	3.414GHz GDDR5	4.008GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	2 x 256-bit	256-bit	2 x 384-bit	384-bit
VRAM	2 x 2GB	2GB	2 x 1.5GB	1.5GB
FP64	1/24 FP32	1/24 FP32	1/8 FP32	1/8 FP32
TDP	300W	195W	375W	244W
Transistor Count	2 x 3.5B	3.5B	2 x 3B	3B
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm
Price	$999	$499	$699	$499

As for power consumption, NVIDIA is designing the GTX 690 around a 300W TDP, with a typical board power of 263W.

The card is equipped with 2 8-pin PCIe power sockets, enabling the card to draw up to 375W, 75W over its standard 300W TDP. Delivering that power will be 10 power phases, so the GTX 690 will have power delivery capabilities nearly identical to the GTX 680.



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. Expected pricing is $999, which is double the price of the GTX 680.