 Welcome to a special Linus Tech Tips unboxing of the EVGA GeForce GTX 690. So yes, this is basically like a 590, like you put it in like a, you know, multiplication machine and it makes two of them. So it's pretty much two, did I say 590? So I meant to say it was 680, I'm sorry. I actually haven't slept very much in the last few days and I apologize if that comes through in this video, but hopefully there will be an update in the next little while as to why that is and then you will all understand, I think. So this is basically like a 680 times two, almost. It has all the same functional units, that is shaders, ROPs, as a GTX 680, but the only key difference is that it is clocked slightly slower. Now remember that the 680 and the 690 by extension have two different clock speeds. By the way, this has a very empty box, like you know how I normally tell you, like the stuff on the box, there's like nothing on it. They expect, I guess if you're spending $1,000 on a graphics card, that you'll probably have some idea of what you're buying, otherwise you wouldn't be doing it. Where was I going with that? Right, right, all the functional units, it is clocked slightly slower, but not by much because remember, 680 and 690 have two clock speeds. There's the base clock and the boost clock. So the base clocks are a little bit different, but the boost clocks are very, very close. And these cards, whenever they are operating within their power envelope, arm yourself with EVGA, very, very cool. Hey, this is cool, I have one of these. It's actually, here, let's go see it, it's over there. That's what my GTX 590 came in. Sweet, see, got my Nvidia Ammo Box. See, very cool. Anyway, sorry guys, just showing off, you know how it is. So as long as they're operating within the power envelope set out by the graphics card, it will operate at that boost clock, assuming no overheating as well. So in practical terms, they are very, very close. A 690 is very close in terms of performance to two 680s in SLI, consumes less power, which is very, very cool, and is also quad SLI capable without so many PCI Express slots being taken out because you can run 680s in quad SLI as well. In terms of included accessories, we have a Powered by EVGA sticker that's got a very cool carbon fiber kind of finish on it, as well as a driver installation disc. We've got a little warning about how the card is hot, and be careful please. EVGA Signature GTX 690 Quick Start Guide, okay. Enthusiast built, okay, very neat. Couple little stickers, user's guides, as well as a few accessories. So accessories, I'm not expecting too much. Okay, oh, please, for Pete's sakes, if you're running one of these cards, please do not use the DVI to VGA adapter. Get a real monitor. Okay, DVI to HDMI, that might come in handy. Next we have a dual 6-pin to 8-pin adapter, two of those, because this graphics card does require two 8-pin power adapters, and my goodness, it's heavy, holy cow. Here, you don't have to come in too close just for the moment, I'm just going to unwrap it here, so you guys will see actually something very cool. I'm going to leave this here for just a second, let you guys take kind of a close look at it. I don't want to touch it too much. Absolutely gorgeous. So we're going to do a quick size comparison against the GTX 680. So that's one thing you guys will notice, it is a bit longer than a regular GTX 680. But it also bears a striking resemblance to the last generation GTX 590, which is in similar fashion to GTX 580's, pretty much, but clocked a little bit slower. So you can see, okay here we go. So you can see it's a fairly similar design. So Nvidia has two vapor chambers here with aluminum fins that have plexi windows, don't worry these stickers come off, you will be able to see them very clearly. So right, aluminum fins on either side cooling the two GPUs. One other thing that they've done is they've adjusted the backplate that's under the fan right there so that it doesn't have gaps in it anymore. This is in theory to reduce turbulence, so they just adjusted the backplate so it cools the components directly rather than requiring that airflow. They have also changed the shroud. See this plastic shroud? Bam, aluminum. As well as, I believe one of these components is magnesium and one of them is aluminum, but you're going to have to forgive me, I can't remember which is which. But the point is that this is almost an entirely metal card, just because we can. And it's a thousand dollar card, so I guess they were able to figure out a way to not only design it almost entirely in metal, but also put an enormous glowing GeForce GTX logo on it that looks absolutely beast. So we had a glowing logo on the 590, now we have increased the size of their logo by a fair significant amount. It also looks quite a bit more sleek. Some guys like backplates, I'm personally not an enormous fan of backplates, they do look very clean. You can see the 590 did have a backplate, whereas the 690 does not have a backplate. The reason for that is because the 690 is using higher density GDDR5 memory modules. These are Samsung modules that are running at 6 GHz. There are none on the back because they're higher density, so you no longer need those backplates in order to cool them. One thing that's really cool about the 690 is that it is significantly overbuilt. So it actually uses a very similar overall layout as the 590 in terms of the PCB, in terms of the power delivery. So they've made some tweaks. But what's cool about that is the fact that these dual graphics cores on this card do not require nearly as much power as the cores that were on the 590. So even though we've got all of this power delivery built into the card, we don't actually need it. So Nvidia has effectively overbuilt the card in a significant way. So what that allows you is a little bit more room for overclocking, although Nvidia doesn't want people overvolting these. I don't know if you guys remember, but there were some horror stories where we had some GTX 590s die due to people overvolting the snot out of them, and the fact that they are pretty much a balls to the walls, take it to the limit design from the get go. So that was a bit of a problem. I wouldn't expect that to happen with the 690 though, just because it is so overbuilt. Now speaking of overbuilt, let's have a look at what all it's got here in terms of the build. So we've got three DVI ports, two DVI, one DVI-D. So this is not going to work with an analog adapter, although you shouldn't be using analog anyway. So if you're going to run Nvidia surround, you can run these three. That would be my recommended configuration. We've also got a mini display port, which I believe can be used in surround as well. But for simplicity of configuration, I would definitely suggest sticking with three DVI ports, especially because if you're going to want to run 3D vision, you will have to use the DVI ports. Now we've also got two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, just like with the 590. And let's just have a bit of a closer look at the overall design of this car. It looks absolutely amazing. I mean, even this. Not plastic, guys. Made of metal. This. Metal. Metal. Metal. We've got these aircrafty, rivety looking things holding the whole thing together. I mean, this is the kind of card that I wouldn't even want to water cool because it looks so amazing with the stock cooler on it. And I've never said that before. I'm a huge water cooling advocate. Now something to bear in mind is if you do buy one of these, you're going to want to make sure you have an adequate case for ventilation because a significant amount of the heat that it outputs is going to go directly into your case towards the front of the case, which is not the natural way that airflow goes through your system. You can also look at redesigning the airflow in your system. So you can bring... Okay, so you guys envision this for me, okay? So you've got it installed in your system. You can change your CPU to an intake and then the front to an exhaust, which isn't necessarily ideal in the sense that heat rises, etc., etc., but it may actually help keep things a little bit cooler. And then the rest of it is going to be exhausted out the IO plate out the back of the system. I'm not sure what else there's to say about it. So yeah, in terms of length, it is pretty much exactly the same as the GTX 590. It just looks way more slick. I mean, check this out. They even put a metal piece on the fan just because it looks amazing. Never seen that before, but there you go. And then it is a little bit longer. It looks to be about an inch longer than the GTX 680. So true to NVIDIA's form, even with their dual GPU cards, they try to keep lengths reasonable without letting them stretch out to be 11 inches long like the Radeon 690 did. I think that pretty much covers it. In terms of performance, what can you expect? Well, single GPU performance is going to be about 95 to 98% of one of these. And dual GPU performance will be about 95 to 98% of two of these. Except, the key difference is that you got it on one card. You save a little bit of power. And yeah, it's expensive, but so is two of these, and that doesn't stop people from buying them. So there you go. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the GeForce GTX 690, which is without a doubt the fastest graphics card ever built. I'm going to put a little asterisk right here at the time of filming this video, because as you guys all know, technology is always moving forward. Yeah, I let you guys down hardcore. It has 4 gigs of RAM. See, I told you I was tired. 2 gigs dedicated per GPU, which means that you've essentially, effectively got 2 gigs of RAM, which should be plenty for triple 1080p, but you might not be able to run the latest games in triple 2560x1600 or something like that. For that, I would probably be looking for a custom 680 SLI configuration with two 4 gig cards. Just something for you guys to bear in mind. So 4 gig card, 2 gigs per GPU.