ASUS GeForce GTX 590 Video Card Review @ [H]

And another thing, along with the power consumption goes the need to cool off the 'whole' system- not just the video card. To set the expectation that this can be done with a couple of 'whisper quiet' 120 mm fans is bogus. This isn't an HTPC, you're setting up a mult-GPU HPC.

Since a lot of air will need to be moved into and out of the case how long before folks start complaining about the need to clean the sucker out every few weeks?
 
Wah damn... 90c imagine running this even in summer will go over 100 ... crazy
 
Lorien said:
Slap a HD6990 with the GTX590 heatsink/cooler and we'd have the ideal Frankenstein card. It seems like the bad reception of the GTX480 by the community left a big impression on Nvidia's collective mind and did all they could to prevent a repeat. Problem is, this time they overdid it.

P.S: Holy crap, some cards are literally blowing up. W1zzard's card blew up on him lol.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_590/27.html
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I hope Kyle and Brent are careful overclocking this thing. TPU is saying it happened while OCing and that its not an isolated incident.
 
Derangel said:
Completely agree. Cards like this are wasted on smaller resolutions. Its just massive overkill to use a $700 card at 1080p.
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I agree with 1080p and 1920x1200 or lower. This card is wasted at those resolutions.

I don't agree with 2560x1600 though.

I have a GTX 580 and I find it wanting at 2560x1600.

That being said I demand all settings maxed and at least 4x MSAA (preferably 8) on everything I play.
 
Dual GPU cards are getting weaker.. seriously theres almost no reason to buy one anymore vs just buying 2 single gpu cards.
 
Very nice review. You guys should do a follow up review with AMD v Nvidia: Quad v Quad, and Quad v Quad OC. :)
 
I think I will be one of the people who get this card, I have never had a single card with dual gpus, but I find my self with a problem, I have a micro ATX board and most cards are to close together so heat is a problem. I could get 2x 570, but they would run a little hotter then I would like and I would possibly need a new PSU which would put me back about the same price as the 590.


Thanks for the great review as always!
 
Hard|OCP said:
As mentioned on the first page, NVIDIA has told us that thousands will be available worldwide. ASUS has told us that hundreds will be available in North America. We don't see the MSRP of the GTX 590 moving down due to tight supplies and the GTX 590 will be a short-lived SKU.
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in my opinion this is the most concerning part for potential buyers. add the fact that you can get better performance for the same price from AMD, there's no reason not to go with AMD.
 
Kenjiwing said:
Dual GPU cards are getting weaker.. seriously theres almost no reason to buy one anymore vs just buying 2 single gpu cards.
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Disagree. At $700 this card is about the same price as a SLI 570 setup. It outperforms 570s in SLI though. Not ecalty clear why considering how low the clock is, but it does.

(Probably lack of SLI bridge and PCIe bus bottlenecks as well as more VRAM and VRAM bandwidth.)
 
I'm asking again, have you noticed any STUTTERING with 6990 in BFBC2? I'm pretty sure it's stutters as hell like 5970 or any AMD card in crossfire + eyefinity.
 
With the 400 series, I really thought Nvidia was losing their game, big time. Then the 500 series came out and I started to feel like they were back and ready to bring on the beatings for AMD. Then the 6990 vs 590 proves that Nvidia still has a long ways to go to catch up to AMD in the areas that count. This is starting to get really sad :/
Only reason I would buy the 590 is because of its noise levels. I do want the most powerful cards available, but I also want the most silent cards available. For anyone looking at my signature and thinking I am some ass who doesn't even rock smokin hot cards, I did own the 5870 at launch, and even had dual 5870's for a while, but sold them before their money value plummeted (such a steal now o_O).
 
Jesus. The mediocre scoring of the card in the review was neither here nor there, if it was overclockable to a reasonable extent, it'd be a perfectly serviceable high end card. But no quad SLI support in the first driver at all, and multiple reports of day-1 VRM failure, even with the TDP limiter still active? A serious ball's been dropped here. nvidia really need to fix these issues, sharpish!
 
not suprising the card is going to be "very limited" in supply, the cost/return compared to selling 2 580s is just insane.

I imagine it will be like the 5970.. an initial small batch and then nothing for a few months-- only this time i don't think the GTX 590 will return.

Bottom line is it looks like ATI's investment in good Power management and efficiency has paid off
 
Zarathustra[H];1037020281 said:
Disagree. At $700 this card is about the same price as a SLI 570 setup. It outperforms 570s in SLI though. Not ecalty clear why considering how low the clock is, but it does.

(Probably lack of SLI bridge and PCIe bus bottlenecks as well as more VRAM and VRAM bandwidth.)
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That is not true. 2 Galaxy 570 cards come up to a total of 659.98 on Newegg and that is without the 40 dollar rebate (80 as Galaxy allows up to two if you buy two of the.) Never mind that the so far the only listings for the card have been above MSRP.

That is nowhere near "about the same." You're looking at over 120 USD difference in savings for "about the same" or better performance with 570 SLI versus a 590.
 
So this is the "Next Generation" card? Amazing what over 2 years of R&D brings! Lol

A very good and honest review, thank you.
 
HohnyF said:
AMD has to catch up. About 7 billions if you count 1 by 1 LOL
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Can you provide more detail? I have no idea what you are talking about.
Nvidia has some really crappy power efficiency, to the point that they had to reign in the speeds on the 590 by severe amounts just to make it not explode. Caring about our ears is their excuse? I buy maybe 20% of that, they've obviously made an effort to improve the acoustics with the 500 series, they did an excellent job in fact. But this card has obviously been limited for different reasons. They just can't go anywhere higher because of power and thermal limits. AMD won this round because they had the foresight to see the power wall everyone would be running into.
 
H-street said:
Bottom line is it looks like ATI's investment in good Power management and efficiency has paid off
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It was always going to for a dual GPU card. The bigger and hotter you make your GPUs, the best performance you can get from a single GPU offering, but the worse you make your dual-GPU offering by comparison. There's only so much power you can put through a card as the failures of the 590s are proving.
 
Derangel said:
If you guys want to laugh at Nvidia some more: Check out their 590 video on Youtube. They are showcasing their $700 "best DX11 card" with Crysis 2 and Homefront. So showing off a DX11 card with games that aren't DX11.
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Both of those games are DX11.....:confused:
 
Rossi~ said:
Both of those games are DX11.....:confused:
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Homefront is DX10. The Wiki article that says its DX11 is wrong. Crysis 2 is DX9 currently and will be DX9 until Crytek decides PC games are worth getting a DX11 patch, if they ever release it.
 
samuelmorris said:
Jesus. The mediocre scoring of the card in the review was neither here nor there, if it was overclockable to a reasonable extent, it'd be a perfectly serviceable high end card. But no quad SLI support in the first driver at all, and multiple reports of day-1 VRM failure, even with the TDP limiter still active? A serious ball's been dropped here. nvidia really need to fix these issues, sharpish!
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Yeah, something(s) tell me this cards gonna blow up on people.
 
What's interesting is that Anandtech's numbers are much more favorable for the 590 than the [H].

Part of it can be explained by Anand not using triple head resolutions and thus not showing the RAM limitation compared to AMD as much.

This only partially explains it though, as in his tests the 590 beats or ties the SLI 570s in most benchmarks This difference can not be explained by the triple head resolutions as the 570s have LESS ram than the 590.
 
HohnyF said:
AMD has to catch up. About 7 billions if you count 1 by 1 LOL
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What is this, I don't even... :rolleyes:

It seems extremely odd that the company putting out cards whose motto could have been, "Performance at all cost" all of a sudden has a change of heart for their dual-GPU solution and decides to put out a tame pony for...$700.

Fantastic review. I know you feel these cards are overkill for 2560x1600, but I would agree with Zarathustra that a single 6970 or 580 can still be insufficient when trying to push IQ. That being said, just seeing what they're able to do at 5760x?? it isn't very hard to extrapolate out how kickass they will be at 2560x.

Competition is good. It seems that, as others have said, AMDs efficiency push has paid off as they're able to still scale up; whereas the GTX 580 is practically bursting out of its single PCB; trying to put two on there, well...only room for 1 of us in this here PCB, pardner. ;)
 
Great write-up :cool:. The GTX 590 falls in where most of us were expecting, which is a disappointment. I'm very much interested in these card failures. There were also reports of GTX 570's not taking overclocking well either and also burning up. NVIDIA's quality is really starting to go downhill.
 
TwistedAegis said:
What is this, I don't even... :rolleyes:

It seems extremely odd that the company putting out cards whose motto could have been, "Performance at all cost" all of a sudden has a change of heart for their dual-GPU solution and decides to put out a tame pony for...$700.

Fantastic review. I know you feel these cards are overkill for 2560x1600, but I would agree with Zarathustra that a single 6970 or 580 can still be insufficient when trying to push IQ. That being said, just seeing what they're able to do at 5760x?? it isn't very hard to extrapolate out how kickass they will be at 2560x.

Competition is good. It seems that, as others have said, AMDs efficiency push has paid off as they're able to still scale up; whereas the GTX 580 is practically bursting out of its single PCB; trying to put two on there, well...only room for 1 of us in this here PCB, pardner. ;)
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i believe he's referring to amd deep in the red while nvidia way in the black.
 
Rossi~ said:
Homefront was made for DX9 + DX11, people are having problems with DX11 but it is a DX11 game.

Crysis 2, from day1 of the demo it was DX9 only as they're releasing DX11 on release (with GTX 590)
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How exactly can Homefront be DX11 when Unreal Engine 3 is a DX10 engine? They would have to rewrite significant parts of the engine.

Sorry, but Crytek waiting for the 590 was only wild speculation started by random people. There has never been any proof that the patch will launch today with the 590. Until the patch is out it is a DX9 game.

Edit: Ok so apparently Homefront is DX11. Ok. So Nvidia is using one lackluster DX11 game and a DX9 game to showcase their new card.
 
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tjwenger said:
My opinion on Making a dual GPU solution to combat noise for Single GPU performance is highly critical. I can see nvidia Making that claim, and some of it may even be a legit concern, but as a business practice it seems ridiculous.

Thant being said, I think Nvidia at a certain level WANTS this card to be overclocked to its true potential giving the end user the ability to determine its own Noise/Performance ratio.
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I think like this:
- nVidia needed, just like AMD, to deliver a card that fit within the power restraints of the standards. Therefore the clocks and voltages were dropped.
- With the power in check, nVidia vent one step further than AMD to also reduce the noise level, and succeeded with this.
- What nVidia failed to do, but AMD did right, was an easy way for the user to get the card running at its true reference speeds. On the 6990 you just flip the switch to the # 1 position and the card goes from "compliant to standards" to "reference speed". The GTX590 only has the "compliant" setting.
 
Mr. K6 said:
Great write-up :cool:. The GTX 590 falls in where most of us were expecting, which is a disappointment. I'm very much interested in these card failures. There were also reports of GTX 570's not taking overclocking well either and also burning up. NVIDIA's quality is really starting to go downhill.
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Considering the g80 - g92, their quality has been problem for some time.

Lots of people are burning up their old 8800 and 9800 cards with new tites like Civ 5.
 
Thanks for the eyefinity resolutions being included! This is the best review yet.
 
Actually, I'm one of the folks the conclusion of the article doesn't think exists: a "high-end enthusiast gamer" who's willing to spend a stupid amount of money on a video card but chooses noise over performance.

I bought a Radeon 5850 last generation, even though it wasn't the fastest card on the market, because it was the fastest card I could get that was near-silent. I just recently upgraded that to a GTX580 (over AMD's faster but noisier 6990) for the same reason.

I haven't been a fan of Nvidia in recent years but I'm definitely on board with their push to create fast (even if not the fastest) performance grade cards that are also super quiet - an approach AMD seems to have abandoned after the 5850. I suspect only the hardest of the hard core are willing to live with a jet engine a couple feet away from their ears, when there's an alternative that's virtually inaudible yet only slightly slower.
 
Anyone else think nvidia will rerelease the card as a gtx595, with the voltage increase, speed increased and more ram and not cater to the "quiet" crowd?
 
Zarathustra[H];1037020474 said:
Considering the g80 - g92, their quality has been problem for some time.

Lots of people are burning up their old 8800 and 9800 cards with new tites like Civ 5.
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A large proportion of 8800s failed during the left 4 dead era as that game was quite good for using the majority of your graphics card even with a slow CPU.
As far as I can tell, the last thing nvidia built properly was the Geforce 7 series. G80 and G92 unreliability is pretty commonplace as googling 'bumpgate' will tell you. They made considerable improvements with the GT200 series but seem to be being let down by poor quality VRMs later in life. How long the GTX470/480 will last with their enormous operating temperatures and already high fan speeds I'm not sure either, as it seems like, at least initially, nvidia reverted to the problematic underfill of the G92 era, as the newer material used on the GT200s couldn't handle the extreme heat of Fermi GPUs. That may have since changed of course.

Up until this point, there was no proof one way or the other to say what build quality was like for the 5 series. Now the GTX590 has had these problems though, I'm not enormously confident.
 
Pretty disappointed in the GTX 590. Runs about the same price as a HD 6990 and under performs it in most cases. The 1.5GB VRam per GPU is also starting to show its weakness in eyefinity resolutions. 2GB VRam is pretty much a requirement for high resolution gaming.

Granted the GTX 590 runs quieter and cooler, it stills sucks about 50w more power than the HD 6990 under load as well. Not to mention aftermarket coolers for the HD 6990 could fix that problem. Nvidia needs to rerelease the GTX 590 with 6GB VRam (3GB per GPU) with performance somewhere between the GTX 570 SLI and GTX 580 SLI to have it compete with the HD 6990 better.
 
samuelmorris said:
Jesus. The mediocre scoring of the card in the review was neither here nor there, if it was overclockable to a reasonable extent, it'd be a perfectly serviceable high end card. But no quad SLI support in the first driver at all, and multiple reports of day-1 VRM failure, even with the TDP limiter still active? A serious ball's been dropped here. nvidia really need to fix these issues, sharpish!
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I think the problem NV is coming up against is simply Mr. Murphy. They have over 2,200 components on that thing according to the article.
 
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