14 DAY TRIAL // Although there isn't that much time left until March 22, when everybody expects Nvidia to make the GTX 590 dual-GPU graphics card official, most of its specifications are still shrouded in mystery, but a recent report comes to shed some light in this regard. According to the leaks that made their way onto the web, the GTX 590 uses a pair of GF110 GPUs, the same core that has been used by Nvidia to power the GTX 580 and GTX 570 graphics cards.
The two GPUs will be installed on the same printed circuit board and connected via an internal SLI link and the cores will be hand-picked by the company in order to make sure that it gets the least power hungry chips of the bunch.
Unfortunately, until now, no details regarding the number of CUDA processing cores or about its default frequencies were known, but a recent Sweclockers report comes to shed some light in this area.
According to the publication, the GPUs used for the GTX 590 are based on a fully enabled version of the GF110 core and each pack 512 stream processors, 64 texturing units, 48 ROP units as well as dual 384-bit memory buses.
These are connected to 3GB of GDDR5 memory that should be clocked at 850MHz (3400Mhz data rate). As for the GPUs, their clocks could range between 600MHz and 700MHz.
In comparison, Nvidia's current flagship card, the GTX 580 has its GPU clocked at 772MHz while the memory works at 1GHz.
However, by going with these reduced clock speeds, Nvidia was able to significantly decrease the TDP of the GTX 590 as this will be rated at “only” 375 Watt compared with the 244 Watt TDP of a single GTX 580.
As noted earlier, the GTX 590 is expected to become available on March 22 and will compete with the recently launched AMD Radeon HD 6990. (via Sweclockers)