Final thoughts and rating

The GeForce GTX 590 is a mighty fast graphics card that metes out performance in spades. Compare it against any single-GPU boards and it hammers them, easily, but you already knew that. Pit it, rightly, against price-comparable graphics setups - Radeon HD 6990, GeForce GTX 570 SLI, Radeon HD 6970 CF, for example - and performance isn't quite as impressive, though still more than enough to play most games at a ludicrous 2,560x1,600 resolution.

Gigabyte's GTX 590 mirrors the reference card. As such, it's primed for multi-monitor usage, and using it at anything less than a full-HD resolution is a distinct waste of money. Presented in a spiffy ~~tool~~box and packaged with a rather good mouse, performance-wise, the £600-plus card offers nothing of real note over the reference card.

But while the default speeds leave the GTX 590 a little behind the Radeon HD 6990, imparting a moderate overclock shows that NVIDIA's top-gun card has genuine potential. Crank it up to 675MHz core and 3,700MHz memory, which is absolutely not guaranteed by Gigabyte, and performance sits between the two settings of the Radeon HD 6990, albeit at a higher power-draw cost.

It's very difficult to justify an investment of over £600 on a single graphics card when equivalent performance, albeit two-card, can be had for almost £200 less. Gigabyte, then, needs to curb pricing for it to succeed, especially as other GTX 590s, ostensibly the same cards, are up to £50 cheaper.

Bottom line: Gigabyte's GTX 590's nice package and three-year warranty are compromised by an inflated retail price.

The Good

Three-year warranty
3D Vision Surround from one card
Has significant overclocking potential
'Free' quality mouse

The Bad

Expensive, even for a GTX 590
Matched by multi-card solutions costing £200 less
Priced too high given the performance

HEXUS Rating

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 3GB

HEXUS Awards

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 3GB

HEXUS Where2Buy

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 can be purchased here.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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With all the talk about 590 SLI certified motherboards, was I the only one hoping for some 590 SLI love in this article? :p

Deleted
With all the talk about 590 SLI certified motherboards, was I the only one hoping for some 590 SLI love in this article? :p

Rampage 3 Extreme and SLI love is incoming. :)

did you run into any throttling issues? and *gulp* any tinkering with the voltage? does the sliders have the potential to go above 1.05?

It's ‘Toe the line’, not ‘Tow the line’ on your final page.

Looks as though AMD have squarely won this challenge - it would seem to me that for those with more cash than sense, the fastest card out of the box is the one that imparts the most bragging rights. Anyone overclocking the bejesus out of their over-priced card to make it run almost as well as the competitor solution at a far greater power draw and heat level is probably missing the point of dropping so much cash in the first place. Of course, anyone who cares more about the performance will go for a bona fide dual card solution and resolve the heat and power issues themselves.

I'm no fanboy, don't get me wrong, but all the graphs bar one so far seem to indicate that AMD have emerged victorious this time.

Still, as a consumer, it's good to see some competitiveness at most levels of the graphics card market, and pushing the 590s to approximately the same level as the 6990/6990OC can only be a good thing to keep the market on its toes!

From another forum….

Well, it had to happen to someone here and it finally has.

Zotac GTX 590 *** AT DEFAULT VOLTAGE ***

BANG!!!!!

I'm so F*****G P****D at this moment I could scream. I bought it from another site on the day of release. It turned up Saturday, so by that time I'd seen and read the whole fiasco on the web with the cards dying… so naturally I said to myself, “Don't be an idiot, give it a few days before you try clocking it.”
Well it's now Monday night and while running 3dMark11 an hour ago I noticed it got really quiet… I leapt for the psu cable. But no. Crack! Poof! Stinking smoke!

I really thought my whole system was gone, the flash was that bright. Thankfully no, I stuck in an old 8800gtx I had and everything booted fine. But the GTX590 is toast, part of the pcb has melted around what looked like a small group of resistors in the lower middle of the card, which have blown, and there's a scorch mark on the other side of the card coming out from under the cooler shroud down to the pci-e fingers.

Believe me the RMA email I've just sent off to E***er was less than gentlemanly. That scared the ever loving c**p out of me. How the hell did Nvidia think they could ship these cards in this state!

PS. Before anyone asks, I dont have a camera, and I've already stuck the bloody thing back in its box for when I get my RMA number tomorrow. Good Riddance!!!

Lets just wait for another nVidia market recall, erh… may be they will just roll out a v2 and replace all those v1 models.

What a cheap experiment for nVidia. LOL :D