It's a ferrari, it's a lamborghini, nay, it's a bugatti veyron of graphics cards!

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-690-benchmark,3193.html

I love the red and green ghost poop too!

This is a beautiful thing, Greg.

BEAUTIFUL.

 The only weird thing is, I loaded the new nvidia 310.70 driver and ran my DirectX10 performance program.  It only tests on 1280x960 or some odd 3D test.  It only does 2800 fps instead of 3400 fps on it with my dual 560ti448's.   The test isn't DX11 smart which this card is and the resolution is so small that it doesn't really matter.   It's like comparing a Bugatti Veyron against a gokart on a gokart track!

The real test is at 1440p, 2560x1440 on BF3. 

I think my CPU is going to be the bottleneck now even though I have an AMD 8150, it doesn't overclock that well.  

 I figure out I want to put it through it's paces.  Launch EA Origin, it wants to re-download 3.4Gig of BF3 add-ons. 

I have Assassin's Creed 3 free game code and Borderlands2 free game codes.

I go to geforce.com/freeassassinscreed3

I have to put in a bunch of information including name, birthdate, etc.  After several tries, it gives me another code to go to Ubisoft.  The link points me off to the Ubisoft checkout page.  I start putting in a whole bunch of information in their digitalriver checkout page, I put the code in.  It shows that the checkout price is $0.00 for digital download, I hit checkout and Firefox crashes.

I try to find the page again, but I end up going to the Ubisoft store, checkout Assassin's creed 3 premium in my cart, put all the info back in, put in the code, no dice.  It want's $79.  I go back to the geforce.com page and it says my code's already been redeemed, but I should have an email.  I go log into gmail.com and nothing in spam folder.  I wait, still no emails, it's lost in the ether. 

I got back to ubisoft to try and figure it out.  I find a normal copy of the AC3 game, put it in the cart, checkout, shows the correct free price, and voila.  Checked out.  I go to download and instead of the game, it lets me download a 2meg game downloader app.  I start the app, configure where I want the files to go.  It wants to download what appears to be 15 Gig??  Hold crap.  I start it running and go to bed.  The next morning, I get up and it's crashed because Windows update decided after it got about 19% in to reboot the machine with mandatory updates.

I restart the downloader and it says all 5 1Gig files it downloaded are corrupt and don't checksum correctly, they speculate that it's because I have DMZ turned on for my network router, which I don't.  I delete the files and start again.  It starts at 19%, not recognizing the files are gone.  I quit out, move it to a new directory and restart.  It still thinks the files are there but even more corrupt now.  I go into the win registry and try to delete any references to the AC3 download program.  I finally give up.

Go to geforce.com/freeborderlands2  Get a key.  This one's easier, it's a steam game.  I use Steam daily.  Launching Steam, it wants to force update, but the update crashes.  SteamTmp.exe can't copy.  Shut it down, uninstall, lose all my pdfs with the free software key codes that were in the directory.  Reinstall, startup, Steam gets to 26% update and crashes.  Steam servers are offline.  Some digging and they aren't.  I delete all the directory and try again.  Same result, except it's taken away my permission to remove anything in that directory.  I change owners of the files and nuke and install again.  I find some obscure support board that tells me to kill the installer in the final stage of the install and then reboot.  That seems to work and I have steam running again, but all my games are gone.

Being risk averse, I do have a steam cache backup.  I suck it in, 15Gig from local disk and go away for 3 hours.  I come back and it's all done.  Now I enter the Borderlands code in.  It starts downloading, it wants to download 3 Gig.  I give up on that for now and start downloading a 1.6 Gig batman ark game--the one that didn't run on my old 560ti448 sli cards even though that was the free game that hardware was bundled with. 

While waiting I start trying to do some work and find out that the nvidia beta driver, 310.70 actually performs pretty crappy.  I download the 306 driver which is the officially relased one.  Quick everything out, do a clean install of the old driver and completely nuking the updated one and all it's settings.  22 hours later and one more reboot from getting to see if the $1k I dropped on this card was worth it.