well it's semiformal review time again guys this is the GeForce GTX 680 from
Galaxy this is the new flagship single GPU graphics card from NVIDIA by our
friends at Galaxy this is a 2 GB uh
frame buffer over 1 GHz core clock and
over 6 GHz memory clock graphics card it
has two six pin power connectors it has a PCI Express 3.0 16x slot is compatible
with uh the variety of SLI configurations that are available using
these two SLI ports and it is on the
latest manufacturing process enabling it to be phenomenally power efficient and
my camera won't focus and perform like the bees knes and supposedly although I
have not yet tested this card it also overclocks
like like wo like pretty good so in
terms of cards that I'm going to be testing against I have a total of seven
cards to be tested so I've got the 7970
from AMD this is a stock bone reference
card to be compared against the reference GTX 680 I have a sapphire
hd7950 so this is an aftermarket card you're going to see this one's strengths
when we get to things like the Acoustics and temperature testing that's going to
be a separate video though this is the performance video we've got the GTX 590
this is a last generation dual GPU card to compare against the current
generation single GPU card uh 6990 so
this is a last generation dual GPU card from AMD then I want to compare the 680
against the 580 as well as the previous
generation GTX 570 so that we can see
where it falls in terms of the overall performance stack now you see 3D Vision
glasses there that's going to be a separate review this is going to be my
2D performance at 1080p review since
that is what the majority of monitors are supporting these days that is what
we are going to be focused on how now I did change a couple things so instead of
using my normal benchmarking settings for the games that I ran I did alter
things a little bit so for Battlefield 3 I'm using the ultra preset for crisis 2
I'm using Ultra Plus highres textures Witcher 2 is ultra plus the vsync is off
Dirt 3 is four times anti-aliasing with high and Ultra we available Batman
Arkham City is going to be using four time multi sample anti-aliasing this is
important which kind of anti-aliasing I'm using because this new card supports
a couple of modes of anti-aliasing that have some distinct advantage txaa and
FXAA but we are not going to be using those for the purposes of this review
this will be Apples to Apples phys X off
okay and Skyrim will be at Ultra with four times msaa 8 times AF vsync forced
off through the inii file and the highres texture pack the official
highres texture pack you can see I've actually finished the benchmarks for all
the other cards this takes forever guys it takes absolutely forever and you can
also see a sneak peek of all the different scenarios I'm planning to run
1080p review ah yes my test bench so this is my uh lg8 2011 test bench with a
363k 30 30 3930k
3930k uh this is running at stock speed so I haven't made any changes to that
guy right there 16 gigs of Kingston hyperx memory a Seuss P9 x79 Deluxe
motherboard as well as of course our h100 for my boot SSD I'm using a mushkin
Kronos Deluxe my steam Drive is running off here and for my power supply I'm
using an ocz ZX Series 1250 W modular
power supply that pretty much covers it for the test bench itself and it is time
to start testing this card because yes
that is the line that is still blank has not yet been on the test pinch I'll be
using the latest drivers on all cards so that is uh 12.2 for the AMD cards and
then the hold on which one is this I'll
have to look because it's going to be a different driver for the new card than
it is for the other card so 29610 for every GeForce card except the 680 which
will'll be using the 300 whatever it is
sorry for the long intro guys here we go here's Rumble investigating my uh
test bench while the GTX 680 runs 3D
Mark 11 my first test of the
night what a brat he is
oh he's stepping on a
6990 get off there go on get
get here we are in the middle of a combined test so to give you guys some
idea how power efficient this guy is check this out it's pulling less than
280 Wat from the wall so that's probably
around 250 WTS of actual power
consumption with the 6 core processor high-end single graphics card and uh
throughout all of this the thing is darn near silent as
well but more on that later a score of 3172 puts it right in line with the rest
of or with uh the GTX 590 in 3D Mark 11
um although significantly behind the 6990 let's see how things go in Real
World gameplay scenarios so as I always
do I'm using well I gu guess I shouldn't say always because Dirt 3 is using a
canned Benchmark and Batman Arkham City is using a canned Benchmark Battlefield
3 is using my usual run through of the comrades beginning of the comrades level
crisis 2 is using my usual run through of the first camp in crisis 2 The
Witcher 2 is using a run through where I go up uh little Hill I fight some guys
go through a building and then come into a courtyard where I fight some other guys and Skyrim uh the town is called
white white run I think something like that and I do a couple laps of White Run
looking at some people looking at some fire looking around so uh stay tuned for
real world gaming benchmarks and the first results are in
so while posting power results that are
very similar to the incredibly power efficient 7970 per it posts also better
average frame rate and the same minimum frame rate compared to the 7970 it
actually performs similarly to the GTX 590 once again while consuming over 150
watts less power at the wall uh something to note here is due to the
very high graphical settings both the 580 and the 570 kind of choked on this
Benchmark so you can see there is an enormous difference between this new
generation premium card and the last generation one now crisis 2 is less of a
clear win against the lower price 7970 but it is still a win nonetheless
so it takes the performance Crown again in crisis 2 something that I've noticed
at this point is that this is actually the first reference GeForce card that
I've encountered that does have coil wi so it's a little bit of a high-pitched
noise that you experience under load with the card and and I'm talking about
in games not in folding at home or anything like that um this is something
that I've experienced on pretty much every reference AMD card for the last
few Generations but hadn't seen on a GeForce card as yet so the 680 does does
exhibit this noise exhibit it um make it The Witcher 2
looks like a tight battle between the 7970 in terms of average FPS and uh the
GTX 680 but in actuality you can see my notes here from when I was testing this
30fps which is considered sort of the minimum of playable was very unplayable
felt very laggy whereas this 30f 32 FPS
actually felt significantly better so uh
so yeah that puts the GTX 680 as far as a single card Solutions go definitely at
the top this is another title where the last generation products from NVIDIA the
uh 580 and the 570 really struggled uh
whether that's due to having less video memory remember the new card has 2 gigs
versus 1.5 and 1.28 on those older cards
um and also has significantly more power but uses a similar amount of
power since I haven't shown you guys my Skyrim test sequence before I'll take
this opportunity to do that so I'm I'm just running around this town following
the same path every time looking off into the distance a little bit I always
stop and look down at this camp for a couple seconds running very smoothly
although I did see a flicker there yeah there's another one so I've experienced
flickering now on the 6990 uh
7970 and uh and this card out of all the
cards that were tested I've seen this flickering on three of them so uh that's
very frustrating definitely detracts from gameplay now I could probably get
the flickering to go away by changing some graphical settings on any of those
given cards but since what I'm trying to do is find a similarly demanding
situation for each of the cards I don't
really want to change any settings and I stop and look at this guard for a second
stop and look at this guard for a second get my cat to go
away um and then off we go around again so while I'm doing the second lap I'll
talk about some other things so first of all is my power testing methodology I
don't know if you guys can see it through the camera yeah you can you can see my power meter so what I'm doing is
while I'm benchmarking I'm keeping an eye on that and what I'm looking for is
sort of something along the lines of of a consistent Peak so if I see it Spike
to 320 once but then you know otherwise hover more around the when it's when
it's under high load around the 300 watt range 305 watt range then that's where
I'll take the reading for that card yeah it's very approximate see this one I'd
probably go with 305 based on what I've seen so far that's something that that's
a peak that I've hit several times so you can see Skyrim isn't running 100%
correctly on this card maybe that's in part due to the early drivers could be
settings um I also want oh yeah so yeah Power and temperatures instead of
measuring power and temps uh with like a
um a synthetic Benchmark what I'm doing
is I'm looking at it in all of the applications that I'm testing in order
to get a good solid um average so this
benchmark's done you can tell cuz the fraps counter has reappeared so I'll
definitely have to make some notes about the flickering on this one and let's go have a look at the results temperature
monitoring is done using MSI afterburner so I'm looking for the peak temperature
which looks like it was 77 here which is consistent with all the other ones this
kind of stands to reason because what the GTX 680 does is it actually uses its
thermal uh thermal envelope to determine how much power to throw at a particular
game uh so it'll actually scale its clock speed let me see if uh if
afterburner is correctly yeah look at that it is monitoring core clock
whoops oh no I don't think it's monitoring that correctly well let's not
worry about that for now then I know that um EVGA Precision is already
updated for the GTX 680 but none of the other applications are right now so 680
comes right oh hold on maybe there was another card yeah flickering on the
590 the 6990 and the 7970 so it looks
like all of the all the the king performers
flickering um had the same issue with
this game so there there you have it so that's the 680 590 580 570 6990 7970 and
7950 so this is in terms of sheer performance a clear win for the GTX 680
where it actually beats out everything in this test by slim margin including
the GTX 590 it definitely felt significantly smoother during use and
once again that impressive power consumption is right there and we're
done here Batman Arkham City which ironically is uh the way it's meant to
be played title is the first game we've seen where the GTX 680 is actually
outperformed by the Radeon hd7970 could
be driver issues because one thing I noticed here is that the power
consumption of the card was significantly lower than it was in the
other games so what that means to me is maybe the GPU core clock isn't scaling
in order to uh to reach its maximum TDP
or maybe there's some driver optimizations that can squeeze some more performance out of this game I guess we
will have to wait and see so just a reminder this is the 680 the 590 the 580
the 570 the 6990 the 7970 and the
7950 which is almost equal with the GTX
680 in this particular title so that pretty much concludes my performance
benchmarks so here we go I'm just going to freeze frame for you guys yeah I
could make graphs but I really don't think that's likely to happen oh idle
power so idle power all of these new generation cards the 680 as well as the
7970 and the 7950 are significant improvements over their last generation
brethren in terms of idle power idle temperatures remain for the most part
fairly similar though uh so let's go
ahead and start hiding row so in review
there's the cards and Battlefield 3 as
including the power and temperatures of all of these
games and we can go ahead and hide those
ones there's crisis 2 including power
temperature minmax and average
numbers The Witcher two so there's our power attempts min
max average remember guys this was completely unplayable whether that's a
driver issue or whatever else this 30 was not playable unlike the 32 here next
We've Got Dirt
three Batman Arkham City which was a Radeon dominated test
this time around well other than the 590
but whatever guys all right and finally
Skyrim which had weird flickering on these four cards and was otherwise uh
fairly normal so thank you for checking out my performance review of the GeForce
GTX 680 in a single card configuration
at 1080p with high SL ultimate or Ultra
graphic settings on a variety of games don't forget to subscribe to lus
techtips for more out of focus videos just like this one and thank you for
watching