Official GTX 590 Review Thread (23 reviews at this time)

[Grooveriding]

Anandtech
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4239/nvidias-geforce-gtx-590-duking-it-out-for-the-single-card-king

HardOCP
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/03/24/asus_geforce_gtx_590_video_card_review

Hardware Canucks
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru.../41903-nvidia-geforce-gtx-590-3gb-review.html

Hardware Heaven
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/revie...graphics-card-launch-review-introduction.html

Techreport
http://techreport.com/articles.x/20629/12

Overclock3D
http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/gpu_displays/asus_nvidia_gtx590_review/1

Xbit Labs
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/geforce-gtx-590.html

Bjorn3d
http://www.bjorn3d.com/articles/Nvidia_GeForce_GTX_590_The_Dual-GF110_Beast/2027.html

Tweaktown
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3952/asus_geforce_gtx_590_3gb_video_card_review/index.html

Alienbabeltech
http://alienbabeltech.com/main/evga-550-pt-2-the-benchmarks

Techpowerup
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_590/

Benchmark Reviews
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=716&Itemid=72

Tom's Hardware
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-590-dual-gf110-radeon-hd-6990,2898.html

PCper
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid...e=expert&pid=1

Bit-Tech
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/gra...0-3gb-review/1

Techspot
http://www.techspot.com/review/378-n...force-gtx-590/

Guru3D
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-590-review/


Pure Overclock
http://www.pureoverclock.com/article1247.html

Overclockersclub
http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/nvidia_gtx590/

Neoseeker
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Ha...force_GTX_590/

Hitech Legion
http://www.hitechlegion.com/reviews/video-cards/9273-evga-geforce-gtx-590-classified

Hexus
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=29724

Hot Hardware
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-590-Dual-GF110s-One-PCB/

Ryan Smith's conclusion:

'If my final thoughts start sounding like a broken record, it’s because once again a set of NVIDIA & AMD product launches have resulted in a pair of similarly performing products.

The crux of the matter is that NVIDIA and AMD have significantly different architectures, and once again this has resulted in cards that are quite equal on average but are all over the place in individual games and applications. If we just look at the mean performance lead/loss for all games at 2560, the GTX 590 is within 1% of the 6990, however within those games there’s a great deal of variance. The GTX 590 does extremely well in Civilization V as we’d expect, along with DIRT 2, Mass Effect 2, and HAWX. Meanwhile in Crysis, BattleForge, and especially STALKER the GTX 590 easily comes up short. Thus choosing the most appropriate card is heavily reliant what games are going to be played on it, and as a result there is no one card that can be crowned king.

Of the games NVIDIA does well in, only Civ V is a game we’d classify as highly demanding; the rest are games where the GTX 590 is winning, but it’s also getting 100+ frames per second. Meanwhile on the games AMD does well at the average framerate is much less, and all of the games are what we’d consider demanding. Past performance does not perfectly predict future performance, but there’s a good chance the 6990 is going to have a similar lead on future, similarly intensive games (at least as long as extreme tessellation isn’t a factor). So if you had to choose a card based on planning for future use as opposed to current games, the 6990 is probably the better choice from a performance perspective. Otherwise if you’re choosing based off of games you’d play today, you need to look at the individual games.

With that said, the wildcard right now is noise. Dual-GPU cards are loud, but the GTX 590 ends up being the quieter of the two by quite a bit; the poor showing of the 6990 ends up making the GTX 590 look a lot more reasonable than it necessarily is. The situation is a lot like the launch of the GTX 480, where we saw the GTX 480 take the performance crown, but at the cost of noise. The 6990’s performance advantage in shader-intensive games goes hand-in-hand with a much louder fan; whether this is a suitable tradeoff is going to be up to you to decide.

Ultimately we’re still looking at niche products here, so we shouldn’t lose sight of that fact. A pair of single-GPU cards in SLI/CF is still going to be faster and a bit quieter if not a bit more power hungry, all for the same price or less. The GTX 590 corrects the 6990’s biggest disadvantage versus a pair of single-GPU cards, but it ends up being no faster on average than a pair of $280 6950s, and slower than a pair of $350 GTX 570s. At the end of the day the only thing really threatened here is the GTX 580 SLI; while it’s bar none the fastest dual-GPU setup there is, at $1000 for a pair of the cards a quad-GPU setup is only another $400. For everything else, as was the case with the Radeon HD 6990, it’s a matter of deciding whether you want two video cards on 1 PCB or 2 PCBs.

Finally, there’s still the multi-monitor situation to look at. We’ve only touched on a single monitor at 2560; with Eyefinity and NVIDIA/3D Vision Surround things can certainly change, particularly with the 6990’s extra 512MB of RAM per GPU to better handle higher resolutions. But that is a story for another day, so for that you will have to stay tuned…'




Stickying this Official GTX 590 review thread. Please post your review links in this thread so they can be added to the OP.

Idontcare
Super Moderator


Edit 2: Unstickying thread. Thanks Grooveriding for your work and diligence to keep the thread up-to-date :thumbsup:

Idontcare
Super Moderator

 

[nanaki333]

i know i shouldn't be surprised, but i was hoping to expect more... should i bother swapping my 6970 CF for a 590 just so i can get 3d vision...

 

[Wag]

It's relatively quiet and performs well. I was expecting a little better performance- hopefully there is a lot of room to o/c. I guess I'll pick one up.

 

[GaiaHunter]

Seems to be as expected - unable to overtake the 6990.

Kudos to NVIDIA for pulling a quieter design. Will be interested to see extreme oc head ons between these cards.

6950 CF still seems the best value for the extreme high end, though.

 

[SlowSpyder]

AT Review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4239/nvidias-geforce-gtx-590-duking-it-out-for-the-single-card-king

 

[Lonyo]

Begs the question whether any AMD partners will be able to make better coolers if they go for custom. You would think with more surface area on the cards they could get at least equal cooling performance (noise/temp).

NV do always seem to do better with dealing with head and noise, and a smaller card using the same power and having lower heat and noise is impressive as usual. AMD always seem to drop the ball in their heatsink/fan setups.

 

[GaiaHunter]

Guru3d single and sli.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-590-review/

http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-590-sli-review/

and [H]

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/03/24/asus_geforce_gtx_590_video_card_review

 

[Morg.]

Gee what an nVidia biased review.

Dis-gusting.

Obviously that poor underclocked 590 is no match and yet the review sounds mitigated.

WOOOAAAAAH shorter board less noise on a reference solution !!!! WOAAAAAAAH like anyone is going to buy a reference solution of a card that costs 700 bucks .

If you ask me, those two very positive points the author of the review is making are pretty much pointless for such products :x

Good thing there's a g3d review up now

 

[Borealis7]

yawn...wake me up next round...

 

[notty22]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-590-dual-gf110-radeon-hd-6990,2898-19.html

Earlier this month, AMD established the Radeon HD 6990 as the fastest card on the planet, unseating its own Radeon HD 5970, the previous title-holder. Today, Nvidia challenges that crown, but ultimately fails to win consistently enough to unseat AMD’s flagship board in a meaningful way. The GeForce GTX 590 simply sacrifices too much in the way of clock rate for its 1024 CUDA cores to definitively overwhelm two Cayman GPUs operating in tandem. This was, of course, a necessary evil in order to fit a pair of unshorn GF110s into a reasonable thermal envelope. In contrast, AMD’s less power-hungry processors didn’t have to be as hamstrung.
Nevertheless, in a comparison between GeForce GTX 590 versus Radeon HD 6990, Nvidia wins.
And it wins because I can put a GeForce GTX 590 in my workstation, which doubles as my gaming machine, and not hear it. It’s quiet enough to use. And that’s a requisite.

 

[Morg.]

Well it looks like THG is paving the way for the next reviews, i.e. non-reference designs

 

[1h4x4s3x]

• quieter
• slower
• hotter
• power hungrier
  
• more expensive

BTW do we now have to put up with notty22 posting only selective graphs for the next 20 pages? I wonder what his motivation is.

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Idontcare
Super Moderator

 

[SlowSpyder]

It looks like Nvidia did ok on this. You get roughly 6990 performance, the prices are the same, but it's much more quiet. But, I would still buy two cards from either camp before I'd consider one of these.

 

[tincart]

Has anyone looked at the difference, if any, between system component temperatures when running a 6990 vs a 590? I remember several reviews looking at increases to HD and CPU temp when running a 6990.

 

[badb0y]

nVidia came out with a pretty balanced product considering all the flak they got prior to launch. They weren't able to reclaim the performance crown but they have a much more user friendly(noise) product.

Overall another wash... WTB 28 NM

 

[Red Storm]

Why does AT continue to not use Eyefinity/Surround resolutions when they review cards like this? The minimum should be 2560x1600, and then it should go up to include the multi monitor setups that are becoming quite popular with the enthusiast crowd.

Has anyone looked at the difference, if any, between system component temperatures when running a 6990 vs a 590? I remember several reviews looking at increases to HD and CPU temp when running a 6990.

In the AT review, they noted their HDD was 5 degrees warmer with the 590 than the 6990 with both at stock clocks. The OCed 6990 was 2 degrees cooler, and for some reason they didn't include OCed 590 numbers.

 

[Jionix]

Less performance, more power-hungry, but it's quieter. Hey, it's quieter! At around 60db (instead of 65db)... Ooook..

I think Ryan's review was fair, which refrains from injecting personal reviewer preference into the decision (unlike Tom's review).

 

[badb0y]

We truly thought the GTX 590 was going to make the Radeon 6990 look bad, but the fact of the matter is that NVIDIA made the 6990 look that much better. The GTX 590 is not the "World's Fastest Single Card Solution" as stated on our page 1 slides; the Radeon HD 6990 is very much retaining that title. Hail to the King, baby!

Hey look I can cherry pick too!

 

[GaiaHunter]

Hey look I can cherry pick too!

Now you only need to post the Dragon Age II bench. ()

 

[1h4x4s3x]

Why does AT continue to not use Eyefinity/Surround resolutions when they review cards like this? The minimum should be 2560x1600, and then it should go up to include the multi monitor setups that are becoming quite popular with the enthusiast crowd.

I've been wondering that too.
Skimmed through all the reviews in the OP and again only [H] did test Eyefinity/Surround resolutions. :thumbsdown:

And, is it me or are guru3d's noise numbers slightly skewed?
Temperatures too. I guess he could learn a thing or two from Mr. Smith.

As our existing body of work for NVIDIA cards has OCP disabled we can’t reach parity with our existing FurMark results, thanks in large part to NVIDIA throttling FurMark far more than necessary. We’re going to go ahead and publish our results, but it’s not the same playing field.

 

[Grooveriding]

Now you only need to post the Dragon Age II bench. ()

Did they bench DA2 in any of these reviews ? ()

 

[1h4x4s3x]

Did they bench DA2 in any of these reviews ? ()

Saw it at hardwareheaven

 

[Grooveriding]

Saw it at hardwareheaven

They did! Still piss poor performance on nvidia using DX11 in DA2 :thumbsdown:

GTX 580 average fps is 21, the 590 is an average of 35 :/

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/revie...graphics-card-launch-review-dragon-age-2.html

 

[Lonyo]

They did! Still piss poor performance on nvidia using DX11 in DA2 :thumbsdown:

GTX 580 average fps is 21, the 590 is an average of 35 :/

Reported for cherry picking and being clearly biased and trolling the thread~ (this is a joke, if anyone didn't realise)

The AT review did state that the drivers shipped to reviewers were the same as the previous ones just with GTX590 support added, so it's no surprise that DA2 hasn't changed at all.

 

[MrK6]

I think Ryan Smith made an excellent point in the conclusion - the 6990 is ahead where it counts. I'd rather see a card that can pull the highest framerates in the most intensive gaming situations as opposed to one that can pull another 50 in a console port. I'm glad he shares my sentiments.

Where I'm surprised is how short NVIDIA came up in in the power usage department, and actually makes the 6990 look efficient. This is not a repeat of the 4870X2 vs. the GTX295. If I was going to have to use one of these cards, the 6990 on water would be the way to go.