Legit Reviews

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 4GB Video Card Review

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 dual-GPU graphics card uses two GK104 Kepler cores and has a total of 3,072 NVIDIA CUDA cores! With a base clock speed 915 MHz and a "typical" Boost clock of up to 1019 MHz, we are pretty sure this card will be faster than anything we have every tested! Read on to see how it performs and overclocks in our review on this monster!

When it comes to the performance results, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 easily becomes the fastest gaming graphics card that we have ever tested. It is also one of the better looking cards that we have ever used as well. You can tell that NVIDIA left no stone unturned and has tried to make this product the best video card the company has ever released.

Article Title: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 4GB Video Card Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1921/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $999

I feel that your heart is not in this anymore.

Do you not have the 7970 crossfire numbers to add to the chart? That would've been a better comparison than 6990 IMO.

Also, why don't you ever run some benchmarks using 3 monitors?

Just go ahead and send that card over to me...

pwcmed wrote:I feel that your heart is not in this anymore.

Do you not have the 7970 crossfire numbers to add to the chart? That would've been a better comparison than 6990 IMO.

Also, why don't you ever run some benchmarks using 3 monitors?

Most don't have 3 monitors, and still all boils down to time.

I'll take two please

I'm a lazy asshole... What else can I say...

Jokes aside, I'll be honest with you.

I got the card Monday afternoon. I finally got drivers late Monday just before 5pm. I had to take and edit all the images, which takes a couple hours and I did that on Monday along with the outline of the article.

Tuesday I was out of the office for an emergency that came up.

Wednesday I worked all day on the review as we had just one day to benchmark the GeForce GTX 690. I also wanted to include GeForce GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990 dual-GPU numbers for those that might be looking to update their card. That is the key audience for this review, so I wanted to make sure I had those numbers in the review. Sure, I have 7970's and I've already done reviews in CrossFire with them, but I was out of time.

I run Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, DiRT 3, H.A.W.X. 2, Just Cause 2, Metro 2033, Heaven 3.0 and 3DMark 11. It takes around 2 hours to run through those benchmarks on a single card at three resolutions. I run the benchmark three times and average the result. You then have to monitor power, noise and temperatures results that you have to get. It take a solid 6 hours per card. I spent from 5am to 11:30pm doing nothing but benchmarking the cards. No shower, eating left overs and standing in front of the PC for 12+ hours...

You also have trouble shooting, driver issues and unforeseen crap happening at this time. For example the red screen of death that happened to me while benchmarking and took a bit to figure out exactly what was causing it and why.
I woke up this morning at 4:30am and finished up the charts and wrote the review. End of story.

As you can see there is no time to run other cards or different monitor setups. If NVIDIA gave us more than 72 hours, then it could have been done easily. Having a big emergency come up also didn't help matters on my end.

pwcmed wrote:Also, why don't you ever run some benchmarks using 3 monitors?

And to answer that... I do and just did a surround review last month here - http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1904/1/

Still a good Review

Hope everything is well Nate.

Just curious here. What happens to that card now? Do you send it back or is it yours to include in future benchmarks?

Hope it was nothing serious with the emergency (although the word emergency usually doesn't mean non-serious).

Major_A wrote:Just curious here. What happens to that card now? Do you send it back or is it yours to include in future benchmarks?

Hope it was nothing serious with the emergency (although the word emergency usually doesn't mean non-serious).

Major_A, the same thing that happens with all the hardware sent to LR over the past 10 years ;)

Everything is okay on my end and is being taken care of. Thanks for asking.

Thanks APO for the nice review.
Nice looking card that isn't too monstrous and appears to actually work. Drivers have improved.
Wonder what it's like to play Metro at 19x10; guess i'll never know.

Maybe I should provide some constructive criticism instead of being an ass.

I liked that you provided the 6990 results, something only you guys did. I just wish you had a permanent 3 monitor setup to test cards like the 690. If I bought this card it would be for a 5760X1080 resolution. Anything below 1080p is irrelevant for this card and wouldn't have even tested anything lower.

Didn't even touch the Adaptive VSync settings. This feature alone has sold me on getting the 680 and would've been nice to see it in action with 690.

What kind of driver issues were you having. That would've been some good info for the article.


Looks like the card is on new already at $1199 plus shipping!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130781

Didn't even touch the Adaptive VSync settings. This feature alone has sold me on getting the 680 and would've been nice to see it in action with 690.

You can actually use this with any CUDA based nVidia video card (i.e. 8x00 GTx, 9x00 GTx, GTx 2x0, GTx 4x0, GTx 5x0, etc...).

pwcmed wrote:Maybe I should provide some constructive criticism instead of being an ass.

I liked that you provided the 6990 results, something only you guys did. I just wish you had a permanent 3 monitor setup to test cards like the 690. If I bought this card it would be for a 5760X1080 resolution. Anything below 1080p is irrelevant for this card and wouldn't have even tested anything lower.

Didn't even touch the Adaptive VSync settings. This feature alone has sold me on getting the 680 and would've been nice to see it in action with 690.

What kind of driver issues were you having. That would've been some good info for the article.


Looks like the card is on new already at $1199 plus shipping!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130781

I'll put it on surround eventually and I'll get some triple panel numbers up. Just got other eggs cooking and 6+ video cards waiting to be reviewed here. Only so much time in the day.

As for the issues... The red screen of deal is due to third party software causing issues. So far I think older version of AIDA64, GPU-Z and FRAPS cause the red screen of deal on Kepler based cards. NVIDIA changed the BIOS a great deal from Fermi to Kepler, so the registers are different. When those applications bang on the card for info (be it clock speeds of frame rate) it causes the red screen of death. I have been using a full version of FRAPS 0.4.8 for benchmark and it cause the issue on the GTX 690 in only Deus Ex. I updated FRAPS to the latest version, which is 0.5.0 and had no issues with the red screen during gaming. I didn't include it in the review as it was a software issue that is only seen on old applications and utilities and was fixed by updating them.

Also, pwcmed...

I am always looking for more help doing reviews. If you are ever interested in doing reviews for LR, let me know. It sounds like you have all the right gear to do so and lord knows I could use the help.

this card is awesome. i want one but haha the price over here in the uk is £900

DJ Tucker wrote:this card is awesome. i want one but haha the price over here in the uk is £900

Yeah this is a product for those with DEEP pockets.

Apoptosis wrote:

pwcmed wrote:Maybe I should provide some constructive criticism instead of being an ass.

I liked that you provided the 6990 results, something only you guys did. I just wish you had a permanent 3 monitor setup to test cards like the 690. If I bought this card it would be for a 5760X1080 resolution. Anything below 1080p is irrelevant for this card and wouldn't have even tested anything lower.

Didn't even touch the Adaptive VSync settings. This feature alone has sold me on getting the 680 and would've been nice to see it in action with 690.

What kind of driver issues were you having. That would've been some good info for the article.


Looks like the card is on new already at $1199 plus shipping!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814130781

I'll put it on surround eventually and I'll get some triple panel numbers up. Just got other eggs cooking and 6+ video cards waiting to be reviewed here. Only so much time in the day.

As for the issues... The red screen of deal is due to third party software causing issues. So far I think older version of AIDA64, GPU-Z and FRAPS cause the red screen of deal on Kepler based cards. NVIDIA changed the BIOS a great deal from Fermi to Kepler, so the registers are different. When those applications bang on the card for info (be it clock speeds of frame rate) it causes the red screen of death. I have been using a full version of FRAPS 0.4.8 for benchmark and it cause the issue on the GTX 690 in only Deus Ex. I updated FRAPS to the latest version, which is 0.5.0 and had no issues with the red screen during gaming. I didn't include it in the review as it was a software issue that is only seen on old applications and utilities and was fixed by updating them.

Also, pwcmed...

I am always looking for more help doing reviews. If you are ever interested in doing reviews for LR, let me know. It sounds like you have all the right gear to do so and lord knows I could use the help.

Damn I thought I responded to this.

I would but my home station job has me traveling about 2 weeks out of the month and my current job, well is pretty remote. I have 2 more months here and will be in the market for 2 GTX 660s if they come out by then. Maybe I can write a triple monitor test review with those. If it doesn't eat up to much time I wouldn't mine writing some reviews for you guys. I really like the random reviews you guys write like your mini ITX build you just did, maybe I can do those.