Gainward’s GTX 690 graphics card is based on Nvidia’s reference design, just like the rest of the aircooled GTX 690 cards that can be found. Nvidia openly stated that they don’t want the card’s air cooler replaced, although they did allow EVGA to strap it with water cooling. You can already find many different water blocks available, but also few air coolers such as Arctic Twin Turbo GTX 690, which launched a few days ago.

We’ve already tested the GTX 690, but the card performed slightly better today. However, it is not due to overclocking but rather due to the new drivers.

GTX 690 uses GK104 GPU, which is a part of Kepler family. Base GPU clock stands at 915MHz, which is 9% lower than the GTX 680’s Base Clock (1006MHz). In fact, this is the only difference when compared to GTX 680’s GPU. The rest of the specs reveal that the GK104 use on GTX 690 is identical to the one on GTX 680 cards. There’s no difference in memory either – the bandwidth is identical. The memory runs at 6008MHz (GDDR5) and each GPU has 2048MB of GDDR5 at its disposal.

Key Features:
  -Kepler architecture
  -NVIDIA GPU Boost
  -NVIDIA Adaptive Vertical Sync
  -NVIDIA TXAA and FXAA technology
  -Microsoft DirectX 11 with DirectCompute5.0 support
  -NVIDIA PhysXtechnology
  -NVIDIA CUDA technology
  -NVIDIA 3D Vision Ready
  -NVIDIA Quad SLI Ready
  -NVIDIA Surround
  -PCI Express 3.0 support
  -OpenGL 4.2 and OpenCLSupport
  -Support for four concurrent displays including:
  -DisplayPort1.2
  -DVI 3 (dual-link)