welcome to a special Linus Tech tips unboxing of the EVGA GeForce GTX 690 so
yes this is basically like a
590 like you put it in like a you know
multiplication machine and you makes two of them so it's pretty much two did I
say 590 cuz what I meant to say was 680 I'm sorry actually haven't slept very
much in the last few days and I apologize if that comes through in this
video but uh hopefully there will be an update in the next little while as to
why that is and then you will all
understand I think so this is basically like a 680 * 2 almost it has all the
same functional units that is shaders ropps as a GTX 680 but the only key
difference is that it is clocked slightly slower now remember that the
680 and the 690 by extension have two
different clock speeds by the way this has a very empty box like you know how I
normally tell you like the stuff on the box there's like nothing on it they
expect I guess if you're spending $1,000 on a graphics card that you probably
have some idea what you're buying otherwise you wouldn't be doing it um
where was I going with that right right all the functional
units it is clocked slightly slower but not by much cuz remember 680 and 690
have two clock speeds there's the base clock clock and the Boost clock so the
base clocks are a little bit different but the Boost clocks are very very close
and these cards whenever they are operating within their power envelope
ARM yourself with EVGA very very cool hey this is cool I have one of these
it's actually here let's go see it it's over there that's what my GTX uh 590
came in sweet see got my NVIDIA ammo
box see very cool anyway sorry guys just
showing off you know how it is um so as
long as they're operating within the power envelope set out by the graphics
card it will operate at that boost clock assuming no overheating as well so in
Practical terms they are very very close
a 690 is very close in terms of performance to two 680s in SLI consumes
less power which is very very cool and is also quad SLI capable without so many
PCI Express slots being taken out because you can run 680s in Quad SLI as
well in terms of included accessories we have a powered by EVGA sticker that's
got a very cool carbon fiber kind of finish on it as well as a driver
installation disc we've got a little warning about how the card is hot and be
careful please EVGA signature GTX 690
quick start guide okay Enthusiast built
okay very neat couple little stickers user guide as well as a few accessories
so accessories I'm not expecting too much uh okay oh for please for Pete's
sakes if you're running one of these cards please do not use the DVI VGA
adapter get a real monitor okay DVI to
HDMI that might come in handy next we have a dual six pin to eight pin adapter
two of those because this graphics card does require two eight pin power
adapters and my goodness it's heavy holy cow uh here you don't have to come in
too close just for the moment I'm just going to unwrap it here so you guys will
see actually something very cool I'm going to leave this here for just a
second let you guys take kind of a a
close look at it want to touch it too much
absolutely gorgeous so we're going to do a quick size comparison against the GTX
680 so that's one thing you guys will notice it is a bit longer than a regular
gtx680 but it also Bears a striking resemblance
to the last generation GTX
590 which is in similar fashion to GTX X
580s pretty much but clocked a little bit slower so you can see okay here we
go so you can see it's a fairly similar design so NVIDIA has two Vapor Chambers
here with aluminum fins that have Plexi Windows don't worry these stickers come
off you will be able to see them very clearly um so right aluminum fins on
either side cooling the two gpus one other thing that they've done is they've
adjusted the back plate that's under the fan right there so that it doesn't have
gaps in it anymore this is in theory to reduce turbulence so they just adjusted
the back plate so it cools the components directly rather than requiring that air flow they have also
changed the Shroud see this plastic shroud bam aluminum as well as I believe
I believe one of these components is magnesium and one of them of them is aluminum but you're going to have to
forgive me I can't remember which is which but the point is that this is
almost an entirely metal card just
because we can and it's a $1,000 card so
I guess they were able to uh to figure out way to not only design it almost
entirely in metal but also put an enormous glowing GeForce GTX logo on it
that looks absolutely Beast so we had a glowing logo on the 590 now we have uh
we have we have increased the size of that their logo by a fair significant
amount it also looks quite a bit more Sleek some guys like back plates I'm
personally not an enormous fan of back plates they do look very clean you can
see the 590 did have a back plate whereas the 690 does not have a back
plate the reason for that is because the 690 is using higher density gddr5 memory
modules these are Samsung modules that are running at 6 GHz there are none on
the back because they're higher density so you no longer need those back plates
in order to cool them one thing that's really cool about the 690 is that it is
significantly overbuilt so it actually uses a very similar overall layout as
the 590 in terms of the PCB in terms of the power delivery so they've made some
tweaks but what's cool about that is the fact that these
dual uh the Dual Graphics cores on this
car do not require nearly as much power
as the cores that were on the 590 so even though we've got all of this power
delivery built into the card we don't actually need it so NVIDIA has
effectively overbuilt the card in a significant way so what that allows you
is a little bit more room for overclocking although NVIDIA doesn't
want people overvolting these I don't know if you guys remember but there were
some horror stories where the GTX we had some GTX 590s die due to people
overvolting the snot out of them and the fact that they are pretty much a Balls
to the walls Take It to the Limit design from the get-go so that was that was a
bit of a problem I wouldn't expect that to happen with the 690 though just because it is so overbuilt now speaking
of overbuilt let's have a look at what all it's got here in terms of the build
so we've got three DVI ports two dvii one DVI D so this is not
going to work with an analog adapter although you shouldn't be using analog anyway um so if you're going to run
NVIDIA surround you can run these three um that would be my recommended
configuration you've also got a dis a mini DisplayPort which I believe can be used in surround as well but for
Simplicity of configuration I would definitely suggest sticking with three
DVI ports um especially because if
you're going to want to run 3D Vision you will have to use the DVI ports now
we've also got two 8 Pin PCIe power connectors just like with the 590 and
let's just have a you know like a bit of a closer look at the overall design of
this card it looks absolutely amazing I mean even this not plastic
guys made of metal this metal metal
metal we've got like these like aircraft riety looking things holding the whole
thing together I mean this is the kind of card that I wouldn't even want to
water cool because it looks so amazing
with the uh with the stock cooler on it and I've never said that before I'm a
huge water cooling Advocate now something to bear in mind is if you do
buy one of these you're going to want to make sure you have an adequate case for
uh for ventilation because a significant amount of the heat that it outputs is
going to go directly into your case towards the front of the case which is
not the natural way that air flow goes through your system you can also look at
redesigning the air flow in your system so you can bring okay so so you guys
Envision this for me okay so you got it installed in your system you can change
your CPU to an intake and then the front to an exhaust which isn't necessarily
ideal in the sense that heat rises etc etc but it may actually help keep things
a little bit cooler and then the rest of it is going to be exhausted out the io
plate out the back of the system I'm not sure what else there is
to say about it so yeah in terms of length it is pretty much exactly the
same as the GTX 590 it just looks way
more slick I mean check this out they even put a metal piece on the fan just
because it looks amazing never seen that before but there you go and then it is a
little bit longer looks to be about an inch longer than the GTX 680 so uh true
to NVIDIA's form even with their dual GPU cards they try to keep lengths
reasonable without letting them stretch out to be you know 11 in long like the
uh the radon 6990 did I think that pretty much covers it
in terms of performance what can you expect well single GPU performance is
going to be about you know 95 to 98% of
one of these and dual GPU performance will be about 95 to 98% of two of these
except the key difference is that you got it on one
card you save a little bit of power and yeah it's expensive but so is two of
these and that doesn't stop people from buying them so there you go thank you for checking out my unboxing and first
look at the gForce GTX 690 which is
without a doubt the fastest graphics card ever built and I'm going to put a
little asteris right here at the time of filming this video because as you guys
all know technology is always moving
forward yeah I let you guys down hardcore it has 4 gigs of RAM see I told
you I was tired 2 gigs dedicated per GPU
which means that you've essentially effectively got 2 gigs of RAM which
should be plenty for triple 1080p but you might not be able to run like the
latest games in triple 2560 x600 or something like that for that I would
probably be looking for like a custom 680 SLI configuration with two 4 gig
cards just something for you guys to bear in mind so 4 gig card 2 gigs
per GPU