ASUS ENGTX590/3DIS/3GD5 Pro Reviews

The GTX 590 is an awesome piece of technology, but its failure to capture the fastest video card crown despite a price tage of £600 is a disappointment.

Ultimately, NVIDIA's dual-GPU GeForce GTX 590 3GB fails in dethroning the Radeon HD 6990 as the world's fastest graphics card. Worse still, cheaper dual-card setups - GTX 570 SLI or HD 6950 CF - offer similar performance for a smaller outlay. Does this make the GTX 590 a bad buy, then? Far from it, because we feel the super-fast card's potential still has some way to go before being fully realised. The real GTX 590 will step forward when partners start overclocking it to with an inch of its life, realising the headroom that exists in the card. It wouldn't be at all surprising to see a GTX 590 Ti make an appearance soon, outfitted with 700MHz core and 4,000MHz memory clocks. AMD has won the battle of the reference cards, no doubt, but matters may just turn in NVIDIA's favour once a slew of partner cards have been through the labs.

When you seek to buy a video card you usually have a certain criteria you are wanting to achieve and the new GTX 590 will outshine just about anything you can compare it with at the moment. This is most likely an overkill video card for many a user, and out of reach financially for others.

After a few days of using the ASUS GTX 590 3GB, I still find myself wondering why NVIDIA opted for such a low reference clock speed. Considering that ASUS themselves promote up to a 50% performance increase with voltage control, we have to think that there's some serious headroom and in talking to some people, it seems that 800 - 850MHz isn't out of the question.

ASUS has put together a great package, and this video card does support VoltageTweak which may be the key to opening up the true potential of the GeForce GTX 590. That's the problem though, you will have to manually overclock it to get the best out of it, while the Radeon HD 6990 is kicking its butt out the door out-of-box stock. Competition is good, but it seems NVIDIA is holding back on us a bit with the GTX 590, playing it safe, and making a quiet video card so they don't get in trouble with complaints from people like us about noise, but at the same time, they've restrained this video cards performance and it shows. Nice try, the video card is pretty, but beyond that, it is not very exciting when you can get the same or better performance with lower power draw and more memory for the same price.

At this point, the GTX 590 delivers the goals it is meant to achieve in terms of thermal performance, acoustic performance, chassis fit, and power consumption. However, power consumption is one of those goals that really should not raise any eyebrows when you are spending at the top of the charts for a gaming rig — it's all about performance at that point. Another thing that NVIDIA and its partners have dealt with is the fact that you used to need two video cards to run an NVIDIA Surround or 3D Surround setup, mainly to ensure the experience was up to par.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 is the new flagship single slot graphics card from NVIDIA and while it wins many of the benchmarks, it doesn't win them all and faces competition from the AMD Radeon HD 6990 that is equally priced.

It’s a credit to Asus that it managed to get us one of these super-high-end cards for our launch article, so we’ll frame our conclusion around this card and its recommended retail price of £590 inc VAT. After all, this is a card that you can actually buy and it uses Nvidia’s reference design throughout (as does every other card at launch we hear) so you can apply much of our findings and verdict to other brands that you might prefer.