well I never really did one of these videos for the Radeon hd7970 and 7950
launches so I guess it's fitting that I get around to it now basically what I'm
doing is my usual length and general
physical comparisons between these various video cards so here the reasons
I've chosen these particular cards for comparison are one the Galaxy GTX 680
and the uh radon hd7970 are sort of the
the New Kids on the Block as far as high performance goes with the GTX 680 being
the newest of all of the cards here the GTX 590 and the Radeon HD 6990 are the
last generation King of the Hill cards both of them are dual GPU solutions that
perform similarly especially once you overclock these uh these newer cards to
these newer single GPU cards so we're going to see what kind of uh in addition
to the much better power characteristics of the 680 and the 7970 how much smaller
physically they are than their previous generation Brethren and the reason I'm
including the GTX 580 is due to the fact that it was a similarly positioned card
to the 680 from the last generation so we want to see what improvements NVIDIA
has made on comparing the last generation single GPU to the current
generation single GPU card so the 680
is exactly 10 in Long one of the things
I like about NVIDIA's reference cards is that they don't unnecessarily lengthen
the card so you see how the PCB ends here and the cooler ends here this is
something AMD just keeps doing and I can't fathom why they do this but check
this out so the radon hd7970 remember
guys this information is important if you need to fit one of these cards in your case the 7970 is about 11 in Long
now what kills me about that is you guys
can see quite clearly here actually I hope you can see quite
clearly here the PCB ends here so they've just got extra random plastic
shroud about yeah it looks like about a quart
of an inch of it right off the back of the card why are you doing that I had
trouble fitting it inside a shuttle X PC Bare Bones uh due to that extra just
little tiny bit of space I mean I did get it in so it wasn't the end of the world but it's just a little bit
frustrating um now in terms of the other
aspects of the layouts of these cards these are both PCI Express 3.0 cards and
they both have two power connectors however the GTX 680 due to its lower
power consumption has two six pin power connectors in a unique stacked
configuration so NVIDIA's theory about this is it'll provide slightly better
Cable Management as well as it buys as
buy them more room on the PCB you can
see here that in theory it uses up less space although you can yeah I don't know
how much I believe that because you can also clearly see next to the Stacked
configuration there are six contact points for where we could have put a six
pin connector right here anyway so yeah
um you know whatever but so okay so in theory it gives them that and uh I mean
maybe hey maybe it's working because they do have a significantly shorter
card than the Radeon hd7970 you can't really tell this is sort of poorly
aligned in terms of the camera but these are sitting at the same spot so this is
how much longer the 7970 is versus the GTX 680 so it has an eight pin and a six
pin now let's compare these to some last generation cards so here we go you know
what let's focus on the 680 since it is the newest card
here how long is it compared to a GTX
580 the 580 is slightly
longer not by much oops oh sorry I'm
having a little bit of trouble with my chest tripod today here guys there we go
now I got it so at 10 1/2 in versus 10
in um there aren't too many cases where that half an inch is going to be the be
all and end all the the actual difference in fact many cases are
accepting graphics cards up to 12 in no problem these days so it's something to
be aware of but if you have a gaming case like any kind of decent case it's
probably not the end of the world now the GTX 590 at 11 in is one of the
longest graphics cards ever produced um
you know for I guess you could call it mainstream but it isn't really but for
for the general consumer Market it's got two8 pin power connectors compared
compared to and this is a similarly performing card especially in scenarios
like 3D Vision uh we are definitely
taking a step in the right direction not to mention the substantially improved
power consumption that we get with the GTX 680 and finally the longest pure
consumer card at 1T long the Radeon 6990
so once again these are similarly performing cards but if you want to talk
performance per inch the uh the 680 is looking pretty good and for that matter
the 7970 looks pretty good too especially once you start overclocking
it so to give you guys some context here I've just brought along a
motherboard because yeah I can sort of measure these in terms of inches but
that really doesn't help you eyeball whether they're going to fit in your case so let's take the 7970 and the GTX
680 and my chest tripod's broken again here guys sorry about the shaky camera
all right so you guys can visualize
based on looking at your motherboard where it sits in your case and where the
edge of your motherboard is see that so the 680 hangs just a little bit let's
see how much it is looks like about a qu of an inch
little over a qu of an inch over the edge of your motherboard so as long as
you have that much clearance on the side of the board then you should be fine
next we've got the 7970 which hangs
about an inch and a qu over the edge of
a motherboard so there you go hopefully that helps guys and don't forget to
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