Nvidia’s answer to a question that no one can afford has been released, the dual GPU Nvidia GTX 590 is here to challenge the king of Uber video cards the ATI 6990. ATI no longer has the Uber video card market to itself, their 6990 video card may still hold the speed crown – only just – but the GTX 590 is hot on it’s heals, the king has some competition.

With a card like the GTX 590 a massive budget is required, $700 USD RRP for the video card might scare the hell out of most people but if your still interested then you’ll need to make sure you can supply the right environment, the infrastructure to support it. The parts you put around this video card will help to get the most out of it. Your case needs 30cm of space for the card, a 700 watt power supply is required to keep this bad boy juiced up, the card will chew 365 watts of power during gaming. You’ll need two 8pin power plugs connected just to start the card.

Nvidia’s GTX 590 is based on the Fermi architecture and manufactured at a 40 nm process. It has a pair of video chips – GPU’s – each with 512 stream processors that have 3 GB of GDDR5 memory available to them. There are over 6 billion transistors packed into two 520mm square chips. That’s a killer pair of punches from Nvidia and a mighty good effort for Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC to achieve.

There is also a third option when it comes to uber video, dual video cards. Both ATI and Nvidia motherboards allow their own style of dual video card. Under testing this is often just as quick as the GTX 590 or ATI 6990, while being a little cheaper, though it is a bit more work. And honestly it is the poor cousin of the Uber video card.

So what is the benefit of such a card. To start with the card will run games faster than most monitors will display, ensuring super smooth graphics all the time, even with the detail set to maximum. It is the situation where you just set games to their highest resolution and detail levels and play, no compromise gaming. With three dvi sockets it will run a trio of big screens upto a resolution of 2560 x 1600.

Both the ATI 6990 and the Nvidia GTX 590 are Uber video cards that will make you the king of high frame rates. The ATI still just barely holds the speed crown – 1% difference – but it’s so close you couldn’t tell. The Nvidia is way ahead on noise while the ATI is a dustbuster when working hard. If you have to have the absolute fastest then the ATI is for you but if you want a video card you can live with day to day the Nvidia is the right card. Both cards will need a solid high spec computer around them to get the most out of them.

So if you feel the need for speed and your not interested in ATI’s Uber dust buster – noisy video card – then there is only one option the Nvidia GTX 590 a King you can actually live with.

Buddha’s Brother out…