Final Words & Conclusion
Wrapping up, you know I'm still a little flabbergasted as to why NVIDIA clocked the card as low as they did. Likely they are ying-yang with the fact that this card performance roughly equal slash close to R6990 performance and simply opted for low noise and a fashionable power consumption. But in this cutthroat business, yeah, I expected NVIDIA to give the R6990 a run for it's money. That is certainly is not the case, especially when you would enable the unlocked mode on the R6990. In all fairness, we think that ATI still applies a trislope optimization giving them a small perf advantage over NVIDIA's defaulted image quality.
Regardless of that yeah, this conclusion is hard. We'll tell you this though, the GTX 590 is downright silent for a multi-GPU product, and believe it or not -- something that simple could very well be the decisive factor for many of you.
Products like the one shown today are always trivial to recommend and most of all, explain. They are expensive and they perform at a level that hardly anyone requires let alone needs. Still that doesn't change the fact that within it's segment and audience, the most high-end cards are desired by a lot of you. Whether it's just to gain a humongous e-peen, an x-factor product or you simple have a desire for the best gaming performance, it's these people that will purchase these dual-GPU monsters, but regardless of what some people think of it this is a superbly performing card.
Performance wise the GTX 590 is a beast, the performance level where it operating in is truly amazing stuff to witness. We'll get into that in am minute. Temperatures remains roughly at 80 Degrees C on this card, and that is when it is completely maxed out and stressed. That is exemplary. TDP wise we measure roughly 350W, considering the perf level; thrown at you, that isn't bad either.
Performance then, you will receive a product that exhausts near silly numbers in terms of frame rate. You can flick on 8xAA and the card really isn't bothered.
As always you do need to keep in mind that a card needs an appropriate PC. Even our Core i7 Nehalem based quad core processor clocked at 3750 MHz still will run into some CPU limitation with the somewhat aging DX9 titles we used. Here also we need to state though that CPU limitations / bottlenecks are not necessarily a bad thing. As long as you pass 60 FPS or your maximum monitor refresh rate -- honestly who cares? So do feel free to enable all image quality settings a game offers you. I mean, if I take Battlefield 2 Bad Company, which is massively GPU dependant and enable all and only the very best image quality settings, apply 8xAA and we still get 106 FPS on average in a monitor resolution of 1920x1200, which is just staggering.
Driver compatibility wise in terms of multi-GPU support, we did not have problems at all. All tested titles worked perfectly fine and overall scaling was pretty snazzy as well, except Crysis Warhead which was producing lower numbers opposed to another beta driver we initially tested. NVIDIA has been very strong on multi-GPU support and once big titles launch, they often release a new driver alongside with it. It would not hurt NVIDIA to release drivers on a more regular basis. It is a complaint as of lately that we are seeing often in our forums, especially when it comes toward multi-GPU driver support this is very important.
Cards like shown today are for the true elite gamers out there. You need that muscular PC, a monitor resolution that starts at 1920x1080/1200 or heck, even three monitors as remember, one GTX 5890 supports surround vision with up-to three monitors as well.
Pricing wise you can expect roughly 540 EUR ex VAT, and that's certainly a lot of money for a graphics card. High-end should never cost more than 499 EUR in our opinion, after that is just very hard to justify. Regardless of pricing, NVIDIA has a very potent graphics card with the GTX 590. It remains very inaudible, temps and power consumption are under control, you get uncompromised image quality and a bucket load of performance.
MSRP’s for Northern Europe:
- Euro Countries – EUR 540 EX VAT
- UK – GBP 569 INC VAT
- NORWAY – NOK 5,249 INC VAT
- SWEDEN – SEK 5,990 INC VAT
- DENMARK – DKK 4,999 INC VAT
Again the x-factor is there and the performance is phenomenal, remember what we said about high-resolution monitors and respect the fact that you'll need a very intoxicating overall PC build as well to feed this card the respect it deserves after which it will quid pro quo for you. And if you like to go really wild with multiple-monitors then this product is starting to make a whole lot of sense.
The cards used today originate from Point of View graphics and honestly the initial batches are all the same regardless of manufacturer. At the time of writing we did not have the specifics of Point of Views's bundle, be sure to give them a visit right here. The GTX 590, well it's a top pick, I mean what else could this be.
Be sure to check out our SLI review as well, 4 GPUs rendering games, craaazy ...
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