Vega's *Heavyweight* display and computer; edition 2012

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:eek:

How much!!!

Not too terrible, around $2100 US.

This forum needs a crying smiley added.....and it should also be green to represent sheer jealousy :( :p

Just curious vega but do you have an insanely good job or did you win your money? :p :D (going by your skills im guessing job but you never know)

Absolute madness but I love it! Vega what do you do for a living if you don't mind me asking? I've also seen your YouTube channel, why don't you post some build log videos?

Just a decent job, military pilot.


Surprisingly in Surround tests the 2GB limit doesn't seem to be hurting the 680, even in games with high-res texture packs:










 
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I bet I'm still a better helicopter in bf3

Your a helicopter? :D


Two of my 4 GTX 680's came in. Hopefully they run my 3x FW900's without a hitch.

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It is amazing how small and light these cards are. The 7970 isn't that large of a card (quite a bit smaller than the 6990's), but for nVidia to get more performance than a 7970 out of such a small package is mighty impressive.


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Well, I found out that in nVidia's infinite wisdom they replaced the dual DVI-I slots found on GTX 580's with a single DVI-I and one DVI-D so each GTX 680 can only output to one analog monitor.

So I need a minimum of three 680's to run my setup which is normally fine, but I only have two 680's at the moment (two others inbound) but only a Z68 MB that can do two card SLI. So I have 680's and I basically cannot use them until Z77 comes out or I just use one monitor. I am tossing around the idea of getting a 3-way SLI capable Z68 from Amazon for temp use and just return it when the Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3 Z77 launches.

I had 3GB 580 benchmarks done and everything. Blasted! Right now 680's are making good paper weights. ;) Maybe I will load up some games on my FW900's at 2560x1600 and crank everything to max and do some benchmarks/memory testing until I get the Surround monitor setup to 680's sorted.
 
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Well, I found out that in nVidia's infinite wisdom they replaced the dual DVI-I slots found on GTX 580's with a single DVI-I and one DVI-D so each GTX 680 can only output to one analog monitor.

So I need a minimum of three 680's to run my setup which is normally fine, but I only have two 680's at the moment (two others inbound) but only a Z68 MB that can do two card SLI. So I have 680's and I basically cannot use them until Z77 comes out or I just use one monitor. I am tossing around the idea of getting a 3-way SLI capable Z68 from Amazon for temp use and just return it when the Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3 Z77 launches.

I had 3GB 580 benchmarks done and everything. Blasted! Right now 680's are making good paper weights. ;) Maybe I will load up some games on my FW900's at 2560x1600 and crank everything to max and do some benchmarks/memory testing until I get the Surround monitor setup to 680's sorted.

That's annoying! 4 680's is gunna be insane :D

Keep up the good work.
 
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Got bored since my third 680 isn't in to run my 3x FW900 setup so I tested one FW900 at 2560x1600 with each applicable game having all settings maxed.


580vs6802560x1600.jpg



The most VRAM use I saw in BF3 was 1930 MB, Crysis 2 was 1971 MB, and the most in Skyrim was 2028 MB, all with no slow-downs with the 680's. The other games were well under 2GB usage.

I am not sure if the limit on the 8x/8x PCI-E 2.0 slots were hurting the 680's more than the 3GB 580's but the 680's in SLI only ended up an average of 24% faster than the 580's. A bit lower than I was expecting.

There was an anomaly that I reproduced having over 100% scaling in 680 SLI Skyrim. If you include that result, SLI scaling is a perfect 100%. If you exclude that result and go off the other four games, the SLI scaling is 90%. Still pretty darn good. As for the reason Skyrim was scaling so incredible in SLI, might be a driver issue with single card as in both instances the GPU's were at max utilization.
 
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Hmm, I was thinking since I am at a decision point with a new motherboard, what would you guys do. This MB will be for my full-on 4-way GTX 680 setup.

Just go ahead and purchase a X79 board now like the Rampage IV Extreme, MSI Big Bang - Xpower II or ASRock Fatal1ty X79 that can do native PCI-E 3.0 at 16x/8x/8x/8x with a 3820/3930k/3960k? Or just get a temp Z68 MB to run 3-way GTX 680 and then purchase the Gigabyte Z77 Sniper 3 when it launches with a 3770k that with a PLX chip can do 8x/8x/8x/8x? I wonder if that PLX chip will lower performance compared to the native speeds of X79.

I am kinda weary about the SB-E chips even under chilled water barely being capable of 5GHz and then regret the purchase if IB launches and can do something like 5.5GHz under chilled water. Thoughts?

Or I could be really crazy and wait for the ASRock Extreme11 X79 that has two PLX chips for 16x/16x/16x/16x but that won't release for another couple months and not sure how much help that super bandwidth will be over native X79 PCI-E 3.0 speeds.
 
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Go for the Asus X79 and 3930k.. You will be sure to have a very solid multi card setup then, the 4 16x slots on the Asrock will do nothing for you apart from trouble.. :S I think anyway, on the very first z68 extreme4 the PLX PEX8608 chip gave me problems with multi 5850's.. Well that's what I put the blame on as my X59 board didn't have the same faults.. just like the NF200 chip did on the extreme 7 it would run fine on a single screen but not on Eyefinity..
 
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Go for the Asus X79 and 3930k.. You will be sure to have a very solid multi card setup then, the 4 16x slots on the Asrock will do nothing for you apart from trouble.. :S I think anyway, on the very first z68 extreme4 the PLX PEX8608 chip gave me problems with multi 5850's.. Well that's what I put the blame on as my X59 board didn't have the same faults.. just like the NF200 chip did on the extreme 7 it would run fine on a single screen but not on Eyefinity..

I see you have the Extreme IV. How do you like it?

I was just reading on Newegg and the average review are only 3 out of 5 egg's (stars). That seems kinda low for a flag-ship MB.
 
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5th GTX 680 inbound (mission critical apps like Surround BF3 need's a replacement backup in case of failure). Couldn't let the 4-way SLI grid be down for too long. :D
 
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