Zotac GTX 590 Review + BenchMarks







The Zotac GTX 590. It's the Zotac revision of nVidia's 500 series monster dual chip card that no body is going to buy because it's still expensive. Despite that though, it's always exciting to see what a GPU like this can do. It's as fast and as powerful as you can get in 500 series of Nvidia GPU family.

Nvidia and AMD have taken different approaches to what their dual GPU cards represent. On the one hand, AMD rely on them for their most high end offering allowing them to focus on smaller, more efficient GPUs such that two can be placed onto one card without any significant tweaking. In essence, it works the same as crossfiring two cards without requiring the need of a compliant motherboard. Nvidia’s philosophy has always been to create the most powerful single GPU but often they have failed to compete with AMD’s dual GPU offerings (HD4870x2 vs. GTX285 or HD5970 vs. GTX480). Their recent achievement of being able to reduce power consumption and heat output of their tweaked Fermi based GF110 GPU has meant that Nvidia were once again able to pair two of them up for unmatched performance and to combat AMD’s HD6990. Afterall the GF110 GPU had already made the GTX580 the most powerful single GPU card on the market so having a graphics card with two of them on-board is recipe for success surely. And thus was born the GTX590 which is predecessor of GTX 690.Nvidia’s GTX590 boasts not one but two fully fledged GF110 GPUs. The GF110 chip shares a lot of its roots with the GF100 core. It still packs an impressive 3.2 billion transistors in a die seize 520mm squared. Its default internal configuration has been ported from GF100 in that the GPU features 512 CUDA cores or shader processors as we are more accustomed to. There are organised in a 4x16x32 block where 16 denotes the number of stream multi-processors (SM) and 32 being the number of cores on each SM. Each SM has its own L1 Cache and a common L2 Cache is shared by all 16, Manufactured on 40nm process.The number of ROPs on each GPU has remained the same at 48 and the L2 Cache is still 768 KB. In terms of shader and texturing power, having 512 CUDA cores boosts performance by 6.6% over 480 CUDA cores. As with the GTX580, the GF110 core employs the mainstream GF104’s superior texture filtering capabilities. Unlike Nvidia’s previous dual GPU card, the GTX295, the GTX590 does not compromise on the number of memory controllers and the memory interface width. Each GPU has its own set of 6 memory controllers each sporting a 256MB framebuffer to give 1536MB of available memory. Although claimed to be a total of 3GB, the two sets work in parallel rather as one set. Similarly, each has a 384-bit memory interface that has been teamed up with GDDR5 memory.Removing the two metal back-plates reveals a total of twelve memory modules with 6 on each side behind each core. In total, the GTX590 boasts 24 modules so the other 12 are on the other side of the PCB. It is clear that the arrangement is asymmetrical based on the positioning of the modules at each ends of the PCB. It’s also good to see each module being passively cooled by the back plate and thermal pads.The GTX590 has a 375W TDP, achieving that by drawing 150W from each 8 Pin PCIe connectors and an extra 75W from the PCIe slot. Overclocking will draw more power but thankfully the more than 150W can be drawn from the PCIe connectors, although both Nvidia and AMD won’t advertise that as such. The connectors are ideally situated on the side of the card to avoid conflicts with HDD cages or other components.Although the card can only support two displays, a plethora of connectors are located on the back I/O panel for good measure. In total are three Dual-Link DVI-I connectors and one mini-DisplayPort connector. The ports also support Nvidia Surround technology, without requiring DisplayPort, as long as another GTX590 is used in SLI. A DVI to HDMI cable is provided for those that need the latter connection. Unfortunately a mini-DP to DisplayPort adapter is not bundled. The back I/O plate features narrow vents that allow hot air to be exhausted at the rear of the case. It's slightly disappointing that with this Zotac GeForce GTX 590 it couldn't have pushed the performance past what we've already seen in the AMD Radeon HD 6990. The fact is Nvidia has created a card that to all intents and purposes performs almost identically for a little bit more money.We fully expected the Nvidia card to beat the AMD dual-GPU monster hands down. After all, its engineers will have had time with the Radeon HD 6990 to see what it could do and would have thought they might have been able to tweak its card to beat it.So Zotac GTX 590 is really faster than Nvidia GTX 590 but its cannot beat AMD HD 6990. The Battle between Nvidia 600 series Dual GPU card Vs AMD 6000 series Dual GPU card is won by AMD.
Let have a look at BenchMark results....



















  • Excellent Performance.
  • Nice Design.
  • Reasonable Size.
  • CUDA and PhysX Support.
  • Innovative.
  • 5 year Warrenty.

  • Not quick than AMD HD 6990.
  • Still a Costly GPU.
  • Noisy.