NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590: Dual GF110s, One PCB

Two, retail-ready GeForce GTX 590 cards arrived in time for this launch article, the Asus GTX 590 and EVGA Classified GeForce GTX 590. Both are pictured below...

   
The Asus GTX 590

Save for a few decals on the front and top of its fan shroud, the Asus GTX 590 is physically identical to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 reference card. Asus does, however, goose the clock speeds on their card slightly to a small increase in performance. Whereas the reference specifications call for a 607MHz GPU clock with 853MHz memory, the Asus GTX 590 sports a 612MHz GPU clock with 855MHz memory.

Asus ships their GTX 590 with a few accessories, which include a DVI-to-VGA adapter, a DVI-HDMI adapter, and dual-6-pin PCIe to single-8-pin PCIe power adapter, a quick installation guide and a driver / utility CD. Asus has also made available a new version of their Smart Doctor utility which allows for clock speed and voltage adjustments on the GTX 590. Due to time constraints, we haven’t spent much time overclocking the GTX 590, but considering how much higher-clocked the same GPUs are on the GeForce GTX 580, it’s clear there is plenty of clock speed headroom left in the GTX 590’s GPUs.

  
The EVGA Classified GeForce GTX 590

The EVGA Classified GeForce GTX 590 arrived in a box about the size of the average sofa cushion. The thing is huge. While the box has foam cut outs for two GeForce GTX 590 cards, hinting a quad-SLI bundle at some point, there was only one card in our package. Along with the card itself, EVGA threw in a ton of stuff, including a T-Shirt, oversized mouse pad, EVGA poster, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, a DVI-HDMI adapter, a mini-DP to full-sized GP adapter, two dual-6-pin PCIe to single-8-pin PCIe power adapters, a quick installation guide and a driver / utility CD.

EVGA also overclocks their card a bit above NVIDIA’s reference specifications. The EVGA Classified GeForce GTX 590 has a 630MHz GPU clock with the 864MHz memory. The backside of the card gets some custom treatment as well. In lieu of two smaller heat-plates on the back, EVGA’s offering is outfitted with a single, long heat-plate the covers the entire length of the PCB.