• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

** Official 680 review thread **

Very impressed with what Nvidia seemed to have achieved with the 680. Maybe it's like going back to 8800GTX days where it was king of the hill. That was a real leap forward.

I have a ATI 5970, and been fed up with AMD's crappy drivers and support. Not saying that I will change as this actually still plays everything at my resolution 2560 x 1600, but power consumption and other factors are pushing me back towards Nvidia again and a single card solution too.
 
Last edited:
tommybhoy said:
GPU boost causing some stutter:

'Lots of trouble, when we look at the time spent on long-latency frames. What happened to the GTX 680? Well, look up at the plots above, and you'll see that, very early in our test run, there was a frame that took nearly 180 ms to produce—nearly a fifth of a second. As we played the game, we experienced this wait as a brief but total interruption in gameplay. That stutter, plus a few other shorter ones, contributed to the 680's poor showing here. Turns out we ran into this problem with the GTX 680 in four of our five test runs, each time early in the run and each time lasting about 180 ms. Nvidia tells us the slowdown is the result of a problem with its GPU Boost mechanism that will be fixed in an upcoming driver update.'

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22653/9

There you go ALXAndy, Nvidia's answer to AMD's faulty zero core issues!
Click to expand...

I think it was down to me Tommy. I've not enabled sleep again since playing around, but here is what happened.

When my card came I went for the obligatory 1125mhz on stock volts. It would lock up. So, I put the card to 1020mhz and it was perfectly stable it seemed.

However, last week I figured I had a bad GPU (every one else seemed to be able to get the 1125 apart from me !) so I did some investigating.

I downloaded AB beta 14 and unlocked the voltage. To my amazement my stock voltage was 1050mhz. So basically I had been running my card at 1020mhz with 1050mv. Apparently this is nothing short of miraculous, and according to a friend of mine the very very early cores were stable on lower volts. Asus followed with a 1100mv bios and then most now use the 1174mv bios.

*THAT* was why every one else could get 1125 without any issues where as my card was locking up. In the end I settled for 1100mv, and sure as eggs went straight to 1125 with absolutely no issues at all.

I've not gone on any further, as I have disabled CCC (I really don't like it) but right now my card is flying along, and I could well have solved the waking issues with Zerocore (it could have been down to the undervolting).

Either way I find Kepler impressive, but I'm pretty sure AMD are not done yet.
 
Duff-Man said:
Out-of-the-box numbers are the only truly valid comparison. Overclocked comparisons are interesting and informative, though never scientifically valid.
Click to expand...

And the Out-of-the -box numbers in these reviews suggest the GTX680 is better than the 7970 in games which is what I'm going to use mine for.
 
318275_10150649951661494_659761493_9559676_2045245831_n.jpg


Just posting this again, as I want to see you 680 owners beat this score....
 
Bit-tech
While we realise that £400 is a great deal to spend on a GPU, we really feel that the performance, power consumption and features on offer with the GTX 680 2GB more than justify the outlay. The GTX 680 2GB represents a meaningful jump in performance, features and efficiency that AMD's high-end hasn't matched and the result is a simply outstanding GPU. If you’ve got the money, then this is the card to get.
Click to expand...

Techpowerup
Pricing of the GeForce GTX 680 is reasonable, with $499. When compared to AMD's $549 HD 7970, the GTX 680 is the clear winner. It offers better performance at similar power consumption and comes with more features.
Click to expand...


HARDOCP
The Bottom Line
NVIDIA has also surprised us by providing an efficient GPU. Efficiency is out of character for NVIDIA, but surely we welcome this cool running and quiet GTX 680. NVIDIA has delivered better performance than the Radeon HD 7970 with a TDP and power envelope well below that of the Radeon HD 7970. NVIDIA has made a huge leap in efficiency, and a very large step up from what we saw with the GeForce GTX 580.



NVIDIA has raised the performance metric at the $499 price point. This is what we expect out of next generation video cards, moving efficiency forward as well as performance at a given price point. The $500 segment just became a lot more interesting, and will give you more performance now than ever before.

We've given many awards to Radeon HD 7970 video cards, and those were well deserved. Now that the GeForce GTX 680 is here, the game changes again, and there is no doubt in our minds that this video card has earned HardOCP's Editor's Choice Gold Award. NVIDIA’s GeForece GTX 680 has delivered a more efficient GPU, lower in TDP, that is better or competitive in performance, at a lower price.
Click to expand...


HEXUS
Bottom line: the GeForce GTX 680 (Kepler GK104) is the Fermi architecture polished to a mirror finish. It is the best high-end GPU available right now, dethroning the AMD Radeon HD 7970 in the process.
Click to expand...



xbitlabs
Nvidia’s response to AMD’s recent advances is quite a success. Based on the GK104 processor with the new Kepler architecture, the GeForce GTX 680 graphics card has proved to be somewhat faster than the AMD Radeon HD 7970 across all the tests. It is also considerably quieter, more energy-efficient, smaller and lighter. The GeForce GTX 680 supports new and efficient antialiasing methods, FXAA and TXAA, which are going to be discussed in our upcoming reviews, and Adaptive V-Sync for smoother gaming. Finishing all this off is the availability of all popular video interfaces and support for multi-monitor configurations.
Click to expand...

Sold me.
 
bloody hell, it's faster than the 7970 and uses less power..... is this right :eek:

this means at a much lesser price that it's close to the MSI LIGHTNING, this changes everything....but it only has 2GB ram
 
Last edited:
elrasho said:
And the Out-of-the -box numbers in these reviews suggest the GTX680 is better than the 7970 in games which is what I'm going to use mine for.
Click to expand...

Lets just call these forums none overclockers lol. Over the years i have seen nothing but people saying but when overclocked this is the better buy. This is overclockers and overclocking is valid. There is nothing much in these cards at all and it seems amd have brought a card out before nvidia that can match there high end. When was the last time this happened. Nvidia usually have better overclocking but not this time around. Lets also factor in this is a brand new architecture for amd and all is rosy for both sides.
 
@ALXAndy good to see you sorted your zero core issue's mate.
dave_beast said:
Just posting this again, as I want to see you 680 owners beat this score....
Click to expand...
:o

Let it go man, you've had the performance for the past 3 months(I've had it for 14 months;)), be happy that the 680 didn't open a can of whipass on the 7970!

They are both good cards, but if I was in the market for a single gpu right now, I would probably get myself a £373 7970!
 
Last edited:
So basically AMD should have made the default clock of the HD 7970 higher then they did, as most are fine doing 1125
 
Mal X said:
bloody hell, it's faster than the 7970 and uses less power..... is this right :eek:
Click to expand...

Sort of.

The 680 uses a dynamic overclocking method. IE - it overclocks itself during games and tests in order to put out the very best scores it can.

So, it could be said that an overclocked 680 is faster than a stock 925mhz 7970. That much is true.

However. If you look a bit more carefully and look at what the 7970 does when overclocked? there is pretty much nothing in it, with, quote Gibbo - "The 7970 overclocked has the edge" or words to that effect.

So basically don't be fooled, as that is clearly what Nvidia want to do.

The fair comparisson is to put both cards at their limits and see what they can do. I am sure over the coming days and weeks this will happen.
 
Mal X said:
bloody hell, it's faster than the 7970 and uses less power..... is this right :eek:

this means at a much lesser price that it's close to the MSI LIGHTNING, this changes everything....but it only has 2GB ram
Click to expand...

At stock this is correct, it's a great card.

What remains to be seen is how well they clock in reality, this boost tech has muddied the waters I think
 
ALXAndy said:
Sort of.

The 680 uses a dynamic overclocking method. IE - it overclocks itself during games and tests in order to put out the very best scores it can.

So, it could be said that an overclocked 680 is faster than a stock 925mhz 7970. That much is true.

However. If you look a bit more carefully and look at what the 7970 does when overclocked? there is pretty much nothing in it, with, quote Gibbo - "The 7970 overclocked has the edge" or words to that effect.

So basically don't be fooled, as that is clearly what Nvidia want to do.

The fair comparisson is to put both cards at their limits and see what they can do. I am sure over the coming days and weeks this will happen.
Click to expand...

It will take time for people to get to grips with the new Kepler method of OCing.

It seems if you push the offset past the capacity of the cards power limits you lose performance so fine tuning the offset into the power envelope is going to be interesting.

Might be a while before we see valid 680 Max OCs.

I really like the idea of Offsets and Intel TurboBoost style clocking. Power and heat savings where you do not need the grunt but some headroom where you do. In realworld gaming (Read not 100% load 100% of the time benchmarks) this could see average/min FPS improvements without craptonne of heat and it's big brother noise.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom