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Is it still worth going for a GTX 680?

Phenomenologica

Phenomenologica

Phenomenologica

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11 Apr 2011
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Edit: Just as an update and to thank you all for the advice, my 7950 arrived this morning to tide me over until upgrade fever bites once all the 20nm cards have arrived, and I've just finished clocking it to a nice stable 1225MHz, 1500MHz on the memory.

Comparing it to the SLI 460s (both at max stable overclock), I'm getting 29% higher framerate in Heaven benchmark, and I can now run Farcry 3 with AA on 8x and some extra filter options at a slightly higher framerate than I could with it set to off beforehand. Thoroughly chuffed, it's a much more significant upgrade than I was expecting, along with being quieter and reassuring me that my PSU will live a bit longer, since my in-game power consumption has dropped by about 25%. Cheers all!

I've currently got SLI 460's, and alongside the fact that they're now pretty out of date I think one of them is on the fritz. As such I'm browsing around for a new single card to replace them, and since I don't have the budget for the lustworthy Titan, the 680 is in my sights.

My question is, how long is it going to be passable for? I'm going to be running games at 1920x1200 on a screen with a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz; does a single 680 happily throw that out at top quality in recent releases, or am I going to be compromising with it? I'm a bit out of the graphics card loop at the moment, and I'd rather hear from owners than reviewers.

I'm aware we're due an announcement for the 780, but frankly I don't have the cash. I can always move up to SLI or resell the card later on if I need an upgrade, but I'd like it to give me good performance in games for a couple of years at least.

Bonus question, is it worth going for the 4GB version over the 2GB, or is that mostly irrelevant at the moment?
 
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If you must buy Nvidia and must buy soon then a GTX670 is what you should be looking at, its within a ball hair of the performance of a 680 and £100 less.

You may get a better life span out of a HD7950/70.

If the rumours are to be believed, a GTX780 will be a cut down Titan and the GTX770 will be a rebadged 4GB GTX680.

2GB IMO will be enough too, its the memory bus speed of the GTX600's that harm them rather then the actual amount of memory.

At the end of the day its your call, but I'd say if you buy any of the top end cards today with a view to adding a second later, you should be set with good performance for a few years yet.
 
Phenomenologica said:
I've currently got SLI 460's, and alongside the fact that they're now pretty out of date I think one of them is on the fritz. As such I'm browsing around for a new single card to replace them, and since I don't have the budget for the lustworthy Titan, the 680 is in my sights.

My question is, how long is it going to be passable for? I'm going to be running games at 1920x1200 on a screen with a maximum refresh rate of 60Hz; does a single 680 happily throw that out at top quality in recent releases, or am I going to be compromising with it? I'm a bit out of the graphics card loop at the moment, and I'd rather hear from owners than reviewers.

I'm aware we're due an announcement for the 780, but frankly I don't have the cash. I can always move up to SLI or resell the card later on if I need an upgrade, but I'd like it to give me good performance in games for a couple of years at least.

Bonus question, is it worth going for the 4GB version over the 2GB, or is that mostly irrelevant at the moment?
Click to expand...

From a price-performance perspective, the card to get would be the 670 from nVidia or the 7950 from AMD, the latter being clearly the best £/perf card at the high end.

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Bonus: 2GB shouldn't be limiting for one 1920x1200 monitor but going into multi-monitor or 2560 monitors, you would need more than 2GB. It is perhaps something to consider as going multi-GPU in the future would still leave you limited to 2GB vRAM.
 
Well the new cards are supposed to be out near the end of this month. So if you are not in a hurry wait and see what they bring to the table.
 
erm i know you say you can't afford the gtx 780 but i still think it might be worth waiting to see what price the gtx 770 commands, since you're thinking about a gtx 680 (which is hardly cheap!).

otherwise yeah, there's actually not much excuse to buy a 680 over a 670 :p.
 
Yeah, makes no sense to pay £400 for a year old video card that's being replaced next month. Might be some good offers on the GTX 670/680 when the new cards are out. Given the new cards are, going by current rumours, just variations on existing models (770 = tarted up 680 and the 780 = a cut down TITAN) I'd have no concerns about buying last years model in this instance if the price was right.
 
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You are asking about getting a gtx 680 in a massively predominant AMD forum. You will never get a straight answer to your question.

I'll try.... Yes it is very worthwhile getting a 680, although I would wait for the 7 series to hit so that the 680 goes down in price first. Dont worry about 2GB vs 4GB, the 2GB is fine.
 
Not worth it now IMO. Wait to see what happens when 700 series is released. Worst that can happen is prices drop immediately (before again rising) to clear stock.
 
OP, don't assume that the new cards will be significantly more expensive than the existing ones. From what I've seen, the GPU manufacturers seem to apply the Apple model of keeping the price of existing kit high until the new stuff comes out, at which point the new kit takes the old price point.

If I was you I would probably stick with your remaining 460 and see what's around the corner. If you wait until the 780/770 and then give it a month for the initial hype to die down you might find they are retailing for roughly what the 680 goes for now (i.e. around £380). If you have to buy soon though, you can't go wrong with a 7950. It's cheap, performs very well, and there's lots of scope for Xfire due to big memory bus and lots of vram.
 
670 is a great if slightly overpriced card. I run two and have been more than impressed with the performance and the lack of issue with SLI compared to Crossfire. I had a 680 and tbh cannot see any difference between the 670 and 680.

A single 2Gb 670 for 1920x1200 would be a good start and you can always add another later when/If the prices drop or you feel you need more performance.

Saying that if your not brand loyal a 7950 can be had for around £200 and does offer better value for money. My personal experience is SLi works a lot better than Crossfire but everyone has there own opinions on this.
 
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