The GTX690 is certainly the fastest single PCB card on the planet and this generation of NVIDIA’s dual GPU card shows great improvements from previous dual GPU cards, but at $1000 MSRP it is essentially the same price as a pair of GTX680s.  [H]ard|OCP’s testing shows that the GTX690 performs at 95-98% of a pair of SLI’d GTX680s so there really is no noticeable performance difference.  This begs the question as to why one might prefer the GTX690 to a pair of GTX680s; to which there are several answers.  The most obvious is the size difference, with a GTX690 taking up one PCIe 16x slot and taking 2 slots on the back of the PC, where an SLI setup requires two PCIe 16x slots and takes up 4 slots on the back.  Not only will the GTX690 leave you more room in your case it will provide better airflow as you will not have two cards sandwiched against each other as will be the case with many motherboards you would also have a much easier time setting up quad SLI.  As well there is the power consumption to consider, in Ryan’s testing the GTX690 needed 30W less than the SLI rig and over 100W less than a pair of HD7970s.  That also resulted in the GTX690 operating at a slightly cooler temperature as well as being quieter, which is almost as important as the performance.  The GTX690 is a beast and if you can afford it … and find it for sale … it makes more sense that buying a pair of GTX680s.

"Is the GeForce GTX 690 the best dual-GPU video card ever built? We’ll compare performance to GeForce GTX 680 SLI and Radeon HD 7970 CFX to see where the new beast from NVIDIA stands. We overclock the dual GPUs and push these as far as we can. Surely this is the best performance ever experienced from a single video card."

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