I was reading over at [H] about the new cooler on this beast:
"Jen-Hsun Huang , president and CEO of NVIDIA, sent his best on a mission. That mission was to build the best dual GK104 video card they could. That mission has been successfully executed and what we have here today is the GeForce GTX 690.
GeForce GTX 690
Can you imagine a video card without any flimsy plastic parts? Now you can because the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 will not be composed of any cheap plastics. A heavy duty dual vapor chamber cooling system relying on heavily nickel plated finstacks will sweat what little heat these GPUs pump out. A cast aluminum frame with trivalent chromium plating gives the card a unique look and tremendous rigidity. An injection molded magnesium fan housing adds to the formidable stiffness of the card. A brand new thixomolding process was used to get the required part precision.
The fan housing is made from injection molded magnesium alloy. Magnesium alloys are used throughout the automotive and aerospace industry (including the engines of the Bugatti Veyron and F-22 Raptor) for their light weight, heat dissipation and acoustic dampening properties - which is the same reason we use it in the GTX 690.
Clear polycarbonate windows that let you peer inside. A center mounted axial fan with optimized fin pitch and air entry angles is a top quality unit used to move cool air through the finstack. While we have not gotten to hear the fan yet, we are told its controller is top notch, which will be underlined by the decibel specs below. A ducted baseplate works with the low profile PCB components. And that is just the cooling system. The GeForce GTX 690 thermal unit cost more than 3X more than NVIDIA has ever spent on thermal system for a retail video card before.
The PCB and its components were not overlooked in the process either. A 10 layer, 2oz. copper PCB is supplied sporting dual 1536 core GK104 "Kepler" silicon all being pushed by a 10 phase "heavy duty" power supply, all in a 300 watt TDP package. If you take a closer look at the PCB you will notice that all usually protruding components have been "shaved" to cut way down on turbulence, allowing better airflow throughout the GTX 690. Also the less turbulence we have, the less noise we have. An on board SLI bridge logic provides independent PCI-e 3.0 x16 access to both GPUs.
Clocks - Noise - RAM
NVIDIA tells us the sound profile of the GeForce GTX 690 will be 36db at idle and a mere 46db under full gaming load.
Base clock on the GeForce GTX 690 is what will be considered "low" by most [H]'ers at just 915MHz Base and 1015MHz Boost, but don't get your panties in a wad just quite yet. Here is the kicker. Being that this is the most expensive and exotic cooling system ever sold by NVIDIA, you think you would expect great overclocking and we are told that you exactly should expect great overclocking. 1300MHz was thrown around more than once while discussing this new GTX 690's overclocks.
Finally this will be the one specification that some will shake their heads at, but from what we have seen in our testing, RAM has not been bottleneck for the most part except in very stressful situations as you can see here in our GTX 680 SLI Review. The GeForce GTX 690 will carry with it 4GB of RAM utilizing a 512-bit GDDR5 infrastructure."
Source:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/04/28/geforce_gtx_690_perfection_inside_out
WOW! $1k for a GPU. I don't ever recall seeing a card this expensive, I feel sorry for who ever buy's this (if it even becomes available). Typical Nvidia fleecing the market and over charging, this is BAD for end user's as it will only drive the prices up/keep the prices up for every other card. ATi will follow suit I'm sure :shadedshu
