Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 review - Introduction

And yes, again a GeForce GTX 590 review, this time from Gigabyte who finished up their retail samples before launch date. This article will cover their product. However, being a 100% reference model card, much of the content you read in this article is similar to our reference article.

In GPU land competition is everything and somewhere down the line somebody decided to place more than one GPU in a graphics card, to beat the competition. Yes yes, hey everybody and welcome to yet another dual-GPU product review. Merely two weeks ago ATI unleashed their Radeon HD 6990, and NVIDIA sat back, relaxed and decided to release their product a little later, close to the release of Crysis 2.

It's now late March 2011 and both graphics gawds have released their most high-end product available. Again let me say it, March 2011, the timing is so weird as typically the most high-end products are released slightly prior to the Christmas season, to take full advantage of the extra cash you guys are willing to spend on the best of the best, as hey, it's the holiday season. But yeah, the graphics industry has changed, is changing and will keep changing alongside the product releases.

Today the GeForce GTX 590 is released. Pretty much NVIDIA in a nutshell took two of their best GPUs, placed them onto one card, topped it off with a very nice cooler and called it a single solution graphics card. Internally on that card however a small NF200 chip functions as a PCI Express bridge in-between the two GPUs and sure, that means SLI in full effect.

The release today however is very interesting, it's one the most silent multi-GPU solutions we have ever had our hands on, the performance really is breathtaking and the power consumption, though high, remains acceptable.

The product reviewed today originates from Gigabyte, they are one of the five board-partners in Europe to be allowed to sell these products. And whether you decide to purchase or not, keep in mind that today's launch might be a hard launch with cards in store, yet the reality will be that very few boards will be available in the first wave. In fact we expect less than 2000 boards being available for the whole of Europe.

Anyway, have a peek at the awesomeness that is the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590, and then head on over to the next page where, as always, we'll go a little deeper, but not too deep. We'll look at noise levels, power consumption, heat, we'll do a nice photo-shoot and heck why not... an extensive benchmark session to see where this product positions itself, especially compared to the Radeon HD 6990.

And finally, a manufacturer that thinks a little outside the box packaging and bundle wise. Have a look at that!