Update on Nvidia’s new members of GTX-family

We are already know that three will be two cards presented this month — GTX 550 Ti (15th of March) and GTX 590 (22nd of March). First thing first.

Although there few hours left before the official announcement of GTX 550 Ti, the Internet is full of info concerning the specs and performance numbers of the novelty. It appears that NVIDIA was too rough on this card and even allowed its partners to sell the card before the actual launch. That is right, the card is already available in some stores around the world, and the first lucky owners already revealed true specification of the newbie as well as tested it to how well it performs.

So now it is confirmed that GeForce GTX 550 Ti is GF116 based graphic card produced using 40nm process logic. The GPU features 192 Cuda cores and clocked at 900MHz (1800MHz for shaders). The card comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory running trough a 192-bit interface. The memory speed is 4100MHz (QDR) which offers 98.4 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. GTX 550 Ti supports NVIDIA-branded technologies like SLI, CUDA, PhysX, and 3DVision. According to NVIDIA, this card should compete with AMD Radeon HD 6700 series cards (former ATI HD 5700 cards). In addition to that, first performance numbers say the card performs better than GTS 450, but shows lower performance numbers than GTX 460 1Gb at stock clocks. However, it was shown by independent testers to overclock to 1000Mhz+ for GPU with stock dual-slot cooling system similar to one of GTX 460. The GTX 550 Ti MSRP is expected to be $149.99.

Now let us move to the most anticipated product from NVIDIA — GeForce GTX 590. There were recent leaks of what can be called marketing slides of this dual-GPU monster.

Though not much of new info leaked, but now we have some data on components placement and cooling solution for GeForce GTX 590. Starting with cooler, its design is similar to one of AMD current flagship — HD 6990- with the fan located in the center blowing the hot air from two vapor chambers covering GPUs outside. The difference here is that the top housing part can be easily taken off for further cleaning. GTX 590 PCB looks close in design with one of HD 6990 to: two GPUs are surrounded by memory chips wich 10-phase power sub-system located in the center making the card look more symmetrical. Due to less on-board memory (3Gb for GTX 590 against 4Gb for HD 6990) all chips are located on one side, so i guess there is no back-plate for GTX 590.

Next, we see card’s specs, some of which were already confirmed, showing the TDP level of 365W drawn through two 8-pin power connectors with maximum possible power provided very close to one stated above — 375W. The card is 11 inches long which is almost of the same length than GTX 580 (10.5 inches).

The most interesting thing about this dual-GPU solution is that it will be released in limited quantity due to chip binning required for this card. For example, in US regions, only ASUS and EVGA are eligible to produce these cards. This should be revealed next week, not much to wait.