Several retailers have GeForce GTX 590 graphics cards for sale, even though NVIDIA has not even announced that the card exists.
It seems NVIDIA’s big secret is out of the bag, thanks to those pesky card manufacturers and their desire to sell products. Take a look at one of the big component retailer websites, like AusPCMarket or one of the handful listed on Staticice (some of the product links on that page seem to now not exist) and you’ll see mention of something called the GeForce GTX 590. It doesn’t take a huge leap of logic to connect this new model number to the teaser video posted by NVIDIA yesterday.
According to the AusPCMarket website, which even links to another website showing off what seems to be NVIDIA’s briefing slides on the card, this is a dual GPU card, with two banks of 1.5GB memory, three DVI and a Mini-DisplayPort ouput. Unlike AMD’s RADEON 6990, which ships with an assortment of Mini-Displayport adapters, this Gigabyte GTX 590 comes with a single Mini-DP to DP adapter as well as a DVI-VGA one.
Interestingly it is apparently only 28cm long, making it slightly shorter than AMD’s 30cm long RADEON 6990 card. As for power consumption, the specifics aren’t clear but the site recommends a 700W PSU with dual 8-pin PCI-Express plugs. This is to be expected from a dual GPU high end card, and it will be interesting to discover just how much juice the card draws.
As befitting a card with an asking price of $1099 the Gigabyte GTX 590 comes in an elaborate toolbox-style case, with bonus ‘Ghost’ Mouse and Mousepad. The card has a green and black design, which seems based upon a reference heatsink rather than Gigabyte’s own WindForce cooler design. This colour scheme would seem to match up nicely with the recently released G1-Killer series of gaming motherboards from Gigabyte.
As for performance, well for that we’ll just have to wait until everything is official. Although with cards for sale even before the product launches the carefully orchestrated announcement looks to be coming apart at the seams already.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012