Now, the purpose of this video is fairly simple. Because of its extremely
scarce availability, the GTX 690, you
know, isn't as popular as people would like for it to be. There's lots of
people out there, I know this for a fact, who want to buy a GTX 690, who
want the ultimate performance, but cannot find one in stock. anywhere. So,
I have one here today and I want to treat this video as sort of a um a what
can you do if you want ultimate performance and can't get a GTX 690 sort
of video. So, it has come to my attention that depending on which
retailer you look at, NCIX not being the one that I'm referring to here, a GTX
690 can go for as much as $1,200, which
is almost exactly the price of three GTX
670s. So, this is going to be a head-to-head comparison in my most
recent um in my most recent
suite of benchmarks between 3-way SLI
GTX 670s and a single GTX 690. I think
we all probably know which one's likely to win at this point, but in case you
don't, that is the purpose of doing these kinds of tests. So, I don't know
if you can see my Fraps meter in the corner there. Look at that. It's like
exactly where the light is making it so you can't see it. Whatever. I'll tell
you what it says. So, this is Battlefield 3. All of the tests are going to be run at 1080p. Yes, I am
aware that 1080p isn't necessarily I actually don't know which way I'm going
anymore. I am aware that 1080p is not necessarily the ideal resolution for,
you know, very high-end graphics card setups. However, I did notice that we do
see scaling in some of the games that I've tested already where we're seeing
more than double the performance in 3-way SLI as we're seeing with a single
card. So, that is a very positive indicator. I'm using the brand new
driver from NVIDIA released on May 22nd. So, this is their R300 driver. This is a
WLE driver that supports uh the GTX 670
and the GTX 690. You can see I'm getting aboutund
195 FPS in Battlefield 3. This is all on ultra settings, so I'm going to be
maxing out every game, uh, The Witcher 2, Battlefield 3, The Elder Scrolls,
Skyrim, and Crisis 2, and bringing you
guys the numbers head-to-head between these two very ultimaty solutions. Now,
I had really wanted to test
four-way SLI, but I actually didn't realize that the 670 does not support
four-way SLI. So, one of these cards is not on the bench, and we're just going
with these three. So, I have my reference card, my Galaxy card, and my
other more different Galaxy card. The one that looks like this with the
glowing logo. Pretty sweet.
So, I'm finished my testing with the GTX 690. So, in case you guys were wondering
what a GTX 690 looks like on the test bench, it's a little something like
that. Looks pretty cool. Let's turn off
the lights. You can see the glowing GeForce logo here, which glows very
strongly and looks very cool as well. One's pretty toasty.
Little bit of coil wine. Not too bad. Not as bad as uh my 680 or uh or any of
my 670s, but not as good as 590, which
had absolutely no coil wine. At least the one that uh that I have. Um
overall, not that loud though. about pretty similar to GTX 590 in terms of
the actual fan speed. Still got a game running on it right now. Definitely
quieter than the 3-way GTX 670 solution
and uh consumes less power, but remember it's two GPUs versus three GPUs. And I I
see that that's five video cards, but I was only running three of them at a
time. So, I'm just going to make up my little graphs and then we're good to go after I tell you the test bench, of
course. So, this is a Radeon radio and radon nothing. uh Core i7 3930K at 4.4
GHz with 16 gigs of Kingston HyperX RAM at DDR3600
megahertz. I also have a Mushkin Kronos
Deluxe drive in there and I've got my Gigabyte
uh what is this thing? It's a GA something or other X79
UD7. So, this is up to a 4-way SLI
Crossfire X capable motherboard, and it's all powered by an OCZ ZX series
1250 watt power supply. Easily capable
of powering those three GPUs. Actually, you know what? It's uh 2:00 in the
morning and I'm actually really tired, so I'm not going to make graphs, you guys. You'll just have to bear with me.
So, here we go. Um, I actually have an upcoming video where I plan to do some
GTX 670 versus Radeon 7970 scaling,
which will be really cool. So, 1, two, and three-way configurations for both,
seeing how they compare. But for this one, we're just looking at three times
GTX 670s versus a single GTX 690. What
is the better value proposition? So, you can see here in Crisis 2, the uh 3-way
SLI configuration actually has a lower overall minimum, but a higher overall
average, but not by much. We're talking a 5% performance advantage. In
Battlefield 3, the 6 the 3x 670 solution just destroys
the single 690. So, this is excellent scaling that we're seeing in this
particular game. Um, I mean, we've got an additional 25 to 30% performance,
probably about 25% performance from adding that additional GPU. So, that is
a pretty good example of of of excellent scaling there. And you can see the
minimum is even higher. That's more like 40%. Outstanding. Skyrim. Yeah, those
look pretty similar to me within margin of error on this side. However, that
minimum frame rate is very different. So, the GTX 690 was uh actually well the
3-way SLI configuration was about 35% higher than the GTX 690 in terms of
minimum FPS. And I did notice that when I was actually using it. Uh, Witcher 2
is another one that uh, scaled okay in
terms of averages with the 3 by GTX 670 configuration, but the minimum was a
little bit lower. Well, quite a bit lower. But something to bear in mind about these minimums is sometimes when
you're benchmarking, your frame rates will dip for sort of no reproducible or
easily explainable reason. And uh, so there's a little bit of that to bear in
mind as well. Personally, I know minimums are important to a lot of people, but personally, I put more
weight into the averages, especially because of the way I'm collecting data
with Fraps. Um, you can get a minimum
that gets, you know, if both cards dip like this, you can get one of them that
records at the very bottom of the dip because it happens to fall on that split
second and one of them that falls here, but that doesn't mean the dip didn't
happen. So, something to bear in mind about Fraps frame rate recording. So,
thank you for checking out my 3-way GTX 670 versus GTX 690 performance review. I
think that we can see that 38 by GTX 670 is a very viable option if you really do
want the ultimate performance and you can't get your hands on one of these bad
boys. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.