Point in 680?

[Cythx]

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.

 

[Cythx]

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.

 

[Cythx]

i had serious trouble with driver support last year and that's a Nvidia card, so i'm not so sure about that

On what setup?

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

 

[Cythx]

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.

 

[Cythx]

The 7970 OC Edition and 680's are still currently at about the same price (£400). I've only seen reference 7970's go down to £340ish.

340 is almost 20% cheaper than the 680 and when both are overclocked they're on par, right?

 

[Cythx]

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.

 

[Cythx]

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.

 

[Cythx]

When [H] was talking of a smoother experience on SLI, I doubt they were mostly talking about 20 FPS. IIRC They just said at lower frame rates, 680 SLI seemed to be smoother at the same frame rate when compared to 7970 CF. They could have meant 20 or 40, I don't know what they meant by low, seeing as in some games they got 140 FPS and some 50 FPS.