Conclusion

Throughout todays articles we have been impressed by the overall design and build quality of the GTX 590 and the Point of View version is no different. For example we get the same near silent cooler, compact PCB (when compared to the 6990) and three dual-link DVIs. Point of View also retain all of the same features which means we can run stereoscopic 3D (3DVision for gaming, 3D Blu-Ray and photos), PhysX and can take advantage of GPU computing for enhanced performance and image quality in tasks such as video encoding.

Looking specifically at the gaming performance in this review it is clear that there are significant benefits to be had from running the GTX 590 at its limit. When AMD sell their card it is running close to maximum and so overclocking doesn't add much. With the GTX 590 we saw the framerates jump significantly as we moved up around 100MHz on core and memory. The end result was a card which competes far better with the 6990 and in cases such as Crysis 2 and BulletStorm the GTX 590 is the faster of the two... Crysis 2 by a huge amount.

Two things that we need to take into account here are that these were tests on the latest games, titles which are important now, rather than games that are unlikely to be played again. In addition to that the performance achieved with the overclock had minimal impact on the noise generated by the GTX 590. Even with the maximum overclock it was near silent and more importantly it was noticeably quieter than the 6990. In fact when we moved back from the 6990 to the GTX 590 in order to compete our testing it was a pleasant change to have the lower noise levels without a significant performance hit.

So how does our experience with the overclock and new drivers affect our feelings on the value of the GTX 590? Earlier we stated that it was a card which felt a little overpriced, the performance was not quite there and driver issues in games such as Shogun 2 took the shine off the card a little. With the latest driver and running at the maximum performance when compared with the 6990 we are happy to report that the GTX 590 now feels a lot more like it is priced appropriately. We get exceptional performance, improved drivers, cooler operation than the competition, significantly quieter operation too... and of course all the benefits of surround gaming, 3D Vision, PhysX and CUDA.

Summary
We have no doubt that Point of View will release a tuned version of the GTX 590 which runs at a similar speed to our manual overclock and we have no hesitation in recommending that model or the stock version. All of the fun with no noise issues and a product which (when overclocked) is worthy of our gold award.

Check out:
GTX 590 Single Card Article
GTX 590 Quad SLI Article

RRP £560