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Point in 680?

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Considering you can get the Sapphire 7970 OC Edition for less money, what's the point in the 680?

From the reviews, the 680 definitely beat the 7970 at stock and at the time, the 7970 was considerably more expensive.

But with the 7970 OC Edition, you should be able to get on par/better performance than an overclocked 680 as from what I've seen, the 7970 has more overclocking headroom.

So basically, the 7970 OC Edition has better; acoustics, thermals, price and on par/marginally better performance. The 3GB looks especially appealing as I have a 2560*1440 screen and may be going multi monitor this year.

Any thoughts? Why should I get a 680? Should I expect 680 price drops considering the 7970 OC Edition is cheaper and supposedly the 7970 stock will drop to £360 soon.
 
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When both are overclocked they perform on par. I also have my eye on the sapphire OC edition. Unless you have a particular red/green preference then just get whatever is cheaper. In this case its the 7970.
 
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Okay so even if they perform on par, there is literally no reason to buy the 680 over the 7970 OC Edition.

I say the above because I still have this feeling I'll be unsatisfied with AMD driver support. I know they had a bad reputation before, but I've heard it's not a bad now. [H] also commented that 680 SLI felt smoother at the same frame rate when compared to 7970 CF, so it seems that AMD still have the worse driver support.
 
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Few things to consider:
1. There are more games in general favour Nvidia more than AMD cards
2. PhysX- yes lots of AMD fanbois will give you the sales speech of how pointless the feature is, but the fact is it is still a nice bonus when play games that support the feature
3. VRAM 3GB vs 2GB- according to reviews, the GTX680 doesn't really suffer even when comparing to the 3GB 7970 on those high res...this is because at that kinda of res, the GPU grunt would be the determine factor, and that would be a limitation far before the VRAM become a issue; if you are talking about 2 or 3 cards in Crossfire/SLI instead of just 1 card, then the 3GB 'might' have benefit over 2GB.
4. The possibility of going dual or triple card in the future- people keeping arguing that drivers neither is better or worse than the other...while it might be true for a single card, but there seem to be much more problems with Crossfire than SLI in general, so it could be something worth considering as well.
 
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Few things to consider:
1. There are more games in general favour Nvidia more than AMD cards
2. PhysX- yes lots of AMD fanbois will give you the sales speech of how pointless the feature is, but the fact is it is still a nice bonus when play games that support the feature
3. VRAM 3GB vs 2GB- according to reviews, the GTX680 doesn't really suffer even when comparing to the 3GB 7970 on those high res...this is because at that kinda of res, the GPU grunt would be the determine factor, and that would be a limitation far before the VRAM become a issue; if you are talking about 2 or 3 cards in Crossfire/SLI instead of just 1 card, then the 3GB 'might' have benefit over 2GB.
4. The possibility of going dual or triple card in the future- people keeping arguing that drivers neither is better or worse than the other...while it might be true for a single card, but there seem to be much more problems with Crossfire than SLI in general, so it could be something worth considering as well.

1 - true..
2 - doesnt PhysX kinda cripple your framerates though? I seem to remember it doing so in Batman AA ay 2560x1600 (my res)
3 - doesnt suffer yet. I keep my cards for 2-3 years.
4 - People always have issues with sli/xfire. single card issues are much less in my experience.
 
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On what setup?

I've literally never had a problem with my nvidia cards

my old 8800 GTX playing Fallout 3...... i had to update the drivers....it got even worst, i had to delete them and reinstall the old ones.....

the eventual glitch was due to either the Radio being on in the wastelands or one of the graphics softwares, F3 had some serious bugs that were never sorted out, if your game like mine was buggy it was a nightmare, but others had no problem at all
 
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Preference doesn't make a difference.

All I care about is: the FPS for a 2560/7680*1440 or similar resolution setup and driver support for both single and dual card setups.
 
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340 is almost 20% cheaper than the 680 and when both are overclocked they're on par, right?

Yes, but myself and no doubt a few others would prefer to see some non-reference cards come down in price (like the Sapphire OC edition) to get better cooling/heat dissipation/reduced noise levels/etc
 
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my old 8800 GTX playing Fallout 3...... i had to update the drivers....it got even worst, i had to delete them and reinstall the old ones.....

the eventual glitch was due to either the Radio being on in the wastelands or one of the graphics softwares, F3 had some serious bugs that were never sorted out, if your game like mine was buggy it was a nightmare, but others had no problem at all

Well for a card that is 6 years old, they're might be some issues. They will probably want to compromise a bit on compatibility for older cards for significant improvements on today's card, I would have thought. I have no idea about drivers and how they work though lol

plus with a game a buggy as Fall Out, a lot of those problems may be due to the game and not just the card. Not saying you didn't experience a driver problem with FO but perhaps you attributed some game bugs to the drivers.
 
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1 - true..
2 - doesnt PhysX kinda cripple your framerates though? I seem to remember it doing so in Batman AA ay 2560x1600 (my res)
4 - People always have issues with sli/xfire. single card issues are much less in my experience.
2- That's mostly like because the graphic card itself is already using all of the resource for pushing the 2560 res, and simply cannot spare anymore for PhysX. PhysX is a good bonus feature, but it does impact on performance...just like applying AA.
4- I've seen far more people that gone and tried Crossfire swearing they are never going to do it again than people that has tried and gone SLI...in fact, I don't really recall people making too many topic about SLI problem...and those that does, it is usually resolved at the end after following peoples' advices; Crossfire problems on the other hand, if peopleare unlucky enough to have problems with it, it is pretty much a lost cause no matter what they do. There were quite a few people ditched their 5970 and "downgrade" to GTX480 for improved gaming experience back then...
 
Soldato
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Well for a card that is 6 years old, they're might be some issues. They will probably want to compromise a bit on compatibility for older cards for significant improvements on today's card, I would have thought. I have no idea about drivers and how they work though lol

plus with a game a buggy as Fall Out, a lot of those problems may be due to the game and not just the card. Not saying you didn't experience a driver problem with FO but perhaps you attributed some game bugs to the drivers.

yea i'm not sure either, all i know is F3 killed my old pc once every half an hour..but it wasn't nearly as bad with the older drivers... hated F3 anyway so i guess it doesn't matter
 
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680 is a frustrating card. It's brilliant and i'm siding for it but the feeling of "this is all we want to give you right now" is annoying.

Even before a price drop the cost of a reference 7970 under water compared to a 680 6+8pin (because the 6+6 is pointless with additional cooling) is worlds apart.
 
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Okay, so I'll look into CF and SLI comparison because it looks like CF causes more issues than SLI. Not just from comments on this forum but as I said, the [H] review noted that SLI looked smoother at 20-30-40 FPS than CF looked at 20-30-40 FPS.

That leaves one question; I've heard I can do 680 SLI on a Seasonic 750w PSU, can I do 7970 CF on the same PSU? 7970 seems more power hungry and also doesn't perform as well as 680 on stock clocks.
 
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Okay, so I'll look into CF and SLI comparison because it looks like CF causes more issues than SLI. Not just from comments on this forum but as I said, the [H] review noted that SLI looked smoother at 20-30-40 FPS than CF looked at 20-30-40 FPS.

That leaves one question; I've heard I can do 680 SLI on a Seasonic 750w PSU, can I do 7970 CF on the same PSU? 7970 seems more power hungry and also doesn't perform as well as 680 on stock clocks.

should be fine, yes :)
 
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Okay, so I'll look into CF and SLI comparison because it looks like CF causes more issues than SLI. Not just from comments on this forum but as I said, the [H] review noted that SLI looked smoother at 20-30-40 FPS than CF looked at 20-30-40 FPS.

That leaves one question; I've heard I can do 680 SLI on a Seasonic 750w PSU, can I do 7970 CF on the same PSU? 7970 seems more power hungry and also doesn't perform as well as 680 on stock clocks.

Why would you pay SLI money only to get 20fps?
 
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