Galaxy GeForce GTX 680 2GB Video Card 1080p Performance Review Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,593 words · ~12 min read
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well it's semiformal review time again guys this is the GeForce GTX 680 from
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Galaxy this is the new flagship single GPU graphics card from NVIDIA by our
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friends at Galaxy this is a 2 GB uh
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frame buffer over 1 GHz core clock and
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over 6 GHz memory clock graphics card it
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has two six pin power connectors it has a PCI Express 3.0 16x slot is compatible
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with uh the variety of SLI configurations that are available using
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these two SLI ports and it is on the
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latest manufacturing process enabling it to be phenomenally power efficient and
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my camera won't focus and perform like the bees knes and supposedly although I
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have not yet tested this card it also overclocks
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like like wo like pretty good so in
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terms of cards that I'm going to be testing against I have a total of seven
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cards to be tested so I've got the 7970
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from AMD this is a stock bone reference
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card to be compared against the reference GTX 680 I have a sapphire
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hd7950 so this is an aftermarket card you're going to see this one's strengths
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when we get to things like the Acoustics and temperature testing that's going to
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be a separate video though this is the performance video we've got the GTX 590
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this is a last generation dual GPU card to compare against the current
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generation single GPU card uh 6990 so
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this is a last generation dual GPU card from AMD then I want to compare the 680
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against the 580 as well as the previous
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generation GTX 570 so that we can see
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where it falls in terms of the overall performance stack now you see 3D Vision
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glasses there that's going to be a separate review this is going to be my
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2D performance at 1080p review since
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that is what the majority of monitors are supporting these days that is what
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we are going to be focused on how now I did change a couple things so instead of
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using my normal benchmarking settings for the games that I ran I did alter
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things a little bit so for Battlefield 3 I'm using the ultra preset for crisis 2
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I'm using Ultra Plus highres textures Witcher 2 is ultra plus the vsync is off
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Dirt 3 is four times anti-aliasing with high and Ultra we available Batman
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Arkham City is going to be using four time multi sample anti-aliasing this is
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important which kind of anti-aliasing I'm using because this new card supports
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a couple of modes of anti-aliasing that have some distinct advantage txaa and
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FXAA but we are not going to be using those for the purposes of this review
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this will be Apples to Apples phys X off
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okay and Skyrim will be at Ultra with four times msaa 8 times AF vsync forced
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off through the inii file and the highres texture pack the official
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highres texture pack you can see I've actually finished the benchmarks for all
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the other cards this takes forever guys it takes absolutely forever and you can
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also see a sneak peek of all the different scenarios I'm planning to run
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1080p review ah yes my test bench so this is my uh lg8 2011 test bench with a
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363k 30 30 3930k
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3930k uh this is running at stock speed so I haven't made any changes to that
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guy right there 16 gigs of Kingston hyperx memory a Seuss P9 x79 Deluxe
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motherboard as well as of course our h100 for my boot SSD I'm using a mushkin
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Kronos Deluxe my steam Drive is running off here and for my power supply I'm
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using an ocz ZX Series 1250 W modular
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power supply that pretty much covers it for the test bench itself and it is time
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to start testing this card because yes
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that is the line that is still blank has not yet been on the test pinch I'll be
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using the latest drivers on all cards so that is uh 12.2 for the AMD cards and
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then the hold on which one is this I'll
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have to look because it's going to be a different driver for the new card than
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it is for the other card so 29610 for every GeForce card except the 680 which
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will'll be using the 300 whatever it is
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sorry for the long intro guys here we go here's Rumble investigating my uh
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test bench while the GTX 680 runs 3D
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Mark 11 my first test of the
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night what a brat he is
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oh he's stepping on a
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6990 get off there go on get
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get here we are in the middle of a combined test so to give you guys some
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idea how power efficient this guy is check this out it's pulling less than
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280 Wat from the wall so that's probably
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around 250 WTS of actual power
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consumption with the 6 core processor high-end single graphics card and uh
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throughout all of this the thing is darn near silent as
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well but more on that later a score of 3172 puts it right in line with the rest
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of or with uh the GTX 590 in 3D Mark 11
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um although significantly behind the 6990 let's see how things go in Real
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World gameplay scenarios so as I always
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do I'm using well I gu guess I shouldn't say always because Dirt 3 is using a
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canned Benchmark and Batman Arkham City is using a canned Benchmark Battlefield
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3 is using my usual run through of the comrades beginning of the comrades level
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crisis 2 is using my usual run through of the first camp in crisis 2 The
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Witcher 2 is using a run through where I go up uh little Hill I fight some guys
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go through a building and then come into a courtyard where I fight some other guys and Skyrim uh the town is called
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white white run I think something like that and I do a couple laps of White Run
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looking at some people looking at some fire looking around so uh stay tuned for
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real world gaming benchmarks and the first results are in
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so while posting power results that are
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very similar to the incredibly power efficient 7970 per it posts also better
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average frame rate and the same minimum frame rate compared to the 7970 it
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actually performs similarly to the GTX 590 once again while consuming over 150
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watts less power at the wall uh something to note here is due to the
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very high graphical settings both the 580 and the 570 kind of choked on this
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Benchmark so you can see there is an enormous difference between this new
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generation premium card and the last generation one now crisis 2 is less of a
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clear win against the lower price 7970 but it is still a win nonetheless
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so it takes the performance Crown again in crisis 2 something that I've noticed
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at this point is that this is actually the first reference GeForce card that
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I've encountered that does have coil wi so it's a little bit of a high-pitched
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noise that you experience under load with the card and and I'm talking about
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in games not in folding at home or anything like that um this is something
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that I've experienced on pretty much every reference AMD card for the last
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few Generations but hadn't seen on a GeForce card as yet so the 680 does does
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exhibit this noise exhibit it um make it The Witcher 2
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looks like a tight battle between the 7970 in terms of average FPS and uh the
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GTX 680 but in actuality you can see my notes here from when I was testing this
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30fps which is considered sort of the minimum of playable was very unplayable
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felt very laggy whereas this 30f 32 FPS
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actually felt significantly better so uh
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so yeah that puts the GTX 680 as far as a single card Solutions go definitely at
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the top this is another title where the last generation products from NVIDIA the
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uh 580 and the 570 really struggled uh
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whether that's due to having less video memory remember the new card has 2 gigs
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versus 1.5 and 1.28 on those older cards
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um and also has significantly more power but uses a similar amount of
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power since I haven't shown you guys my Skyrim test sequence before I'll take
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this opportunity to do that so I'm I'm just running around this town following
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the same path every time looking off into the distance a little bit I always
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stop and look down at this camp for a couple seconds running very smoothly
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although I did see a flicker there yeah there's another one so I've experienced
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flickering now on the 6990 uh
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7970 and uh and this card out of all the
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cards that were tested I've seen this flickering on three of them so uh that's
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very frustrating definitely detracts from gameplay now I could probably get
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the flickering to go away by changing some graphical settings on any of those
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given cards but since what I'm trying to do is find a similarly demanding
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situation for each of the cards I don't
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really want to change any settings and I stop and look at this guard for a second
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stop and look at this guard for a second get my cat to go
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away um and then off we go around again so while I'm doing the second lap I'll
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talk about some other things so first of all is my power testing methodology I
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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
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while I'm benchmarking I'm keeping an eye on that and what I'm looking for is
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sort of something along the lines of of a consistent Peak so if I see it Spike
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to 320 once but then you know otherwise hover more around the when it's when
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it's under high load around the 300 watt range 305 watt range then that's where
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I'll take the reading for that card yeah it's very approximate see this one I'd
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probably go with 305 based on what I've seen so far that's something that that's
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a peak that I've hit several times so you can see Skyrim isn't running 100%
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correctly on this card maybe that's in part due to the early drivers could be
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settings um I also want oh yeah so yeah Power and temperatures instead of
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measuring power and temps uh with like a
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um a synthetic Benchmark what I'm doing
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is I'm looking at it in all of the applications that I'm testing in order
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to get a good solid um average so this
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benchmark's done you can tell cuz the fraps counter has reappeared so I'll
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definitely have to make some notes about the flickering on this one and let's go have a look at the results temperature
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monitoring is done using MSI afterburner so I'm looking for the peak temperature
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which looks like it was 77 here which is consistent with all the other ones this
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kind of stands to reason because what the GTX 680 does is it actually uses its
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thermal uh thermal envelope to determine how much power to throw at a particular
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game uh so it'll actually scale its clock speed let me see if uh if
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afterburner is correctly yeah look at that it is monitoring core clock
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whoops oh no I don't think it's monitoring that correctly well let's not
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worry about that for now then I know that um EVGA Precision is already
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updated for the GTX 680 but none of the other applications are right now so 680
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comes right oh hold on maybe there was another card yeah flickering on the
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590 the 6990 and the 7970 so it looks
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like all of the all the the king performers
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flickering um had the same issue with
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this game so there there you have it so that's the 680 590 580 570 6990 7970 and
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7950 so this is in terms of sheer performance a clear win for the GTX 680
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where it actually beats out everything in this test by slim margin including
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the GTX 590 it definitely felt significantly smoother during use and
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once again that impressive power consumption is right there and we're
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done here Batman Arkham City which ironically is uh the way it's meant to
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be played title is the first game we've seen where the GTX 680 is actually
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outperformed by the Radeon hd7970 could
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be driver issues because one thing I noticed here is that the power
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consumption of the card was significantly lower than it was in the
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other games so what that means to me is maybe the GPU core clock isn't scaling
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in order to uh to reach its maximum TDP
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or maybe there's some driver optimizations that can squeeze some more performance out of this game I guess we
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will have to wait and see so just a reminder this is the 680 the 590 the 580
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the 570 the 6990 the 7970 and the
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7950 which is almost equal with the GTX
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680 in this particular title so that pretty much concludes my performance
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benchmarks so here we go I'm just going to freeze frame for you guys yeah I
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could make graphs but I really don't think that's likely to happen oh idle
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power so idle power all of these new generation cards the 680 as well as the
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7970 and the 7950 are significant improvements over their last generation
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brethren in terms of idle power idle temperatures remain for the most part
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fairly similar though uh so let's go
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ahead and start hiding row so in review
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there's the cards and Battlefield 3 as
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including the power and temperatures of all of these
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games and we can go ahead and hide those
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ones there's crisis 2 including power
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temperature minmax and average
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numbers The Witcher two so there's our power attempts min
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max average remember guys this was completely unplayable whether that's a
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driver issue or whatever else this 30 was not playable unlike the 32 here next
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We've Got Dirt
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three Batman Arkham City which was a Radeon dominated test
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this time around well other than the 590
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but whatever guys all right and finally
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Skyrim which had weird flickering on these four cards and was otherwise uh
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fairly normal so thank you for checking out my performance review of the GeForce
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GTX 680 in a single card configuration
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at 1080p with high SL ultimate or Ultra
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graphic settings on a variety of games don't forget to subscribe to lus
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techtips for more out of focus videos just like this one and thank you for
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watching