Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor I boxed for an episode of throwback Thursday yep that's what I'm calling it now when I look at older PC hardware I'm sure you all think it's a cool name and very original so let's just swiftly move along and talk about today's video sponsor today's video is brought to you by Dyson and their new range of cordless and just kidding guys but seriously Dyson let's talk right so today we're revisiting an old friend 2012's geforce gtx 680 released roughly this time six years ago it was in video's latest and greatest offering at the time replacing the then 14 month old GTX 580 another GPU from the green team that we've recently revisited before we get to the gaming benchmarks so let's quickly recap the GTX 680 specs and a bit of history about the architecture that's based upon for those of you not interested in a trip down memory lane I'll throw up some pretty footage of the graphics card in question so enjoy that based on the Kepler architecture the GPU is codenamed GK 104 it marketing videos transition to the 28 nanometer process and allowed for a massive 3.5 billion transistors to be crammed into a tiny 294 millimeter squared die Nvidia also managed to squeeze in what was at the time a massive 1536 CUDA cores three times that of the GTX 580 not only that but the cores were clocked 30% higher and yet overall the GPU consumed less power the focus for Kepler was on efficiency basically Nvidia broke down their previous Fermi architecture right down to the core and then rebuilt it to improve power consumption and the die size the result was the world's fastest gaming graphics solution at least when it was first released AMD actually beat Nvidia to the punch three months earlier and alright how times have changed anyway although the GTX 680 was 4% cheaper at launch and offered 7% more performance in my tests it did suffer from poor availability for quite a few months after release so I guess some things don't change back then AMD did do a good job of keeping nvidia on its toes for example a Radeon HD 4000 series spurred a war that saw the GTX 280 5000 series enjoyed a complete lack of competition for half a year before the GTX 400 cars arrived and as I said in 2012 AMD was almost three months ahead with the HD 7970 being they were slightly behind it was very important for Nvidia to come out guns blazing and to a certain extent that's precisely what they did the GTX 680 was without a question the fastest single GPU graphics card and money could buy not only was it faster than HD 7970 but it was also more efficient quieter and cheaper when it was first released it actually be quite interesting to see how they compare today this might be a good idea for next week's throwback Thursday for now though I'm keen to see how the GTX 680 stacks up against more modern GPUs in modern games representing the old vintage GPU as the game wood phantom model sporting a more standard 2 gigabyte variant buffer for the time I've recently purchased a 4 gigabyte model and that should arrive in the next week or two at which point I do plan to do a 2 gigabyte vs. 4 gigabyte gtx 680 comparison in modern titles and that might also make for an interesting video all testing has been conducted on our corsair GPU test rig which comprises of a core i7 87 or okay clocked at 5 gig 'it's with 32 gigabytes of vengence ddr4 3,200 memory so how does the gtx 680 stack up today let's go find out first up we have battlefield 1 and please note while these results were recorded using the ultra quality preset I have retested and shown actual gameplay footage with the medium quality settings and you'll see that later in the video for now you can see that under these conditions the GTX 680 is actually slower than the Radeon HD 7950 though what's a whopping 81 percent faster than the GTX 580 no doubt the slightly larger memory buffer is helping to improve things here this time when testing with Dawn of War 3 the GTX 680 managed to roughly match the HD 7950 and this meant as a result it was once again a much faster than the GTX 580 though percent low result was also respectable and clearly two gigabytes is the minimum frame buffer size you can get away with in this title when using the medium quality preset so I suppose no real surprises there interestingly the GTX 680 does very well in dirt for taking out top spot with an impressive 116 FPS on average using the medium quality settings this meant on average it was 12% faster than the HD 7950 and 81% fast and the GTX 580 moving on to firaon away again see very strong performance from the GTX 680 as it again takes out the top spot on our graph here here it was 25% faster than the HD 7950 and 60% fast in the GTX 580 performance in Ghost Recon wildlands was decent as the GTX 680 roughly matched the HD 7950 and was more than twice as fast as the GTX 580 although we're only using the low quality things the game is still very heavy on video RAM usage almost maxing out the two Gilbert frame buffer on the GTX 680 using the medium quality settings in Mass Effect Andromeda performance was still very solid as the GTX 680 allowed for 70 FPS on average though it was slow in the GTX 1050 Ti only slightly fast in the HD 7950 moving on to prey using the higher quality preset you really need a 4 gigabyte frame buffer in this title and with the gtx 680 almost all the textures were actually missing our leaving us with just blurry surfaces still overall the performance was good the game did run smooth despite the fact that we were missing some textures and well while it did play ok it didn't look particularly nice then finally we have Resident Evil 7 and here the GTX 680 came in just behind the GTX 1050 Ti on HD 7950 using the medium quality preset and managed to average 98 FPS and this minute was 44% fast in the GTX 580 so overall the GTX 680 seems to deliver a similar experience to the other GTX 1052 I but let's take a closer look at that ok so here's a breakdown of the 8 games we just looked at not average we can see that the GTX 680 is basically matching the gtx 1050 Ti I'm a little surprised by this because last time I compared them the 1050 TI came out on top that said I did only check out 5 games and it was a very close comparison and the GTX 680 was faster only one of the games that overlaps with this test and that game was Battlefield 1 so some interesting results for sure but before I wrap things up let's quickly look at some gameplay footage first up I played a few rounds of Rainbow six siege and found I averaged the GTX 680 was good for over 100 FPS when using the medium quality settings it's a DP the frame time performance was also excellent enabling smooth gameplay that allowed even a novice like me to get a few decent shots in overall a great experience and it's fair to say you could have a lot of fun in this title with the gtx 680 the experience in battlefield 1 with the medium quality preset was very solid at times the game was very smooth and playable at over 50 FPS on average there are other times there was noticeable framerate lag as the frame sort of dipped into the low 40s overall though it was very playable and an enjoyable experience under these conditions I found a very similar experience when playing battlefront 2 but this time using the higher quality settings here the frame rates were excellent Lang for a smooth and certainly very playable experience with the higher quality settings the game also looked great and I was impressed with an average of just over 60 fps moving on we have fortnight and this title plays very well on pretty much anything using the high quality preset the GTX 680 averaged just over 70 FPS and after 10 minutes of gameplay remained over 50 fps at all times and the frame time data was also very solid like fortnight overwatch is a tile that you can play on pretty much anything even with the ultra quality settings and here the GTX 680 allowed for an average of almost 90 FPS while framerate stayed above 50 FPS at all times and again the frame time data was also very good then wrapping things up we have player knowns battlegrounds and it actually ran pretty well I saw an average of 66 FPS with a minimum of 59 fps using the medium quality settings and overall it was a smooth and very playable experience oh and I almost forgot one last thing power consumption here we see that the GTX 680 reduced the total system consumption by almost 20% when compared to the GTX 580 and given how much faster it was this is a significant step forward in terms of performance per watt that said it's still push system consumption 26% higher than that of the Radeon HD 7950 a little over 60% higher when compared to the GTX 1052 I so certainly not great by today's standards but not a terrible result overall so that covers pretty much everything in terms of performance with the exception of overclocking but those results will vary a bit from card to card the factory overclocked model that I have wasn't really behaving itself when overclocked and I didn't really have a heap of time to mess around with it but then I did go back and have a look at my original review published at text spot all those years ago and it turns out that this particular card here is a pretty rubbish overclocker so that's probably what I was running into it I can only get about 67 more megahertz out of the core over the factory overclock so not particularly great there are models that will go much higher than that I do have a four gigabyte model in the mail so check that out when it arrives and see if it's willing to play ball anyway in terms of extra performance you're probably looking anywhere from 5 to 15% more frames depending on how well the card overclocks this model here was only about 5% so kind of not really worth the time and effort invested anyway for those of you not interested in overclocking the good news is that a typical factory overclocked model such as the gamer version that I used that should be able to match a factory overclocked gtx 1050 TI in most titles as you just saw overall it was a single frame slower on average and two frames slower for the 1% lower result it was also 8 percent faster than the HD 7950 and 13 percent faster than the vanilla gtx 1050 it also who absolutely blitzed to the older GTX 580 by a mammoth 65 percent margin that 1536 megabyte frame buffer of the GTX 580 is just too limited for many of today's modern titles and we're even seeing issues with two gigabytes now it'll be interesting to see just how the four gigabyte version of the gtx 680 compares when I get my hands on it next week for now though 1050 TI light performance is very acceptable and you can certainly enjoy yourself for the latest and greatest titles at 1080p using respectable quality settings for those poor souls who have forgotten how much a GTX 1052 I should cost I went and looked it up a hundred and thirty-nine dollars u.s. is the actual MSRP I know that doesn't sound right but apparently it is today though if you got one for $200 u.s. you'd actually be doing quite well as absurd as that sounds so can you save some money and get a gtx 680 secondhand well sure you can if you're lucky jumping over to ebay comm we see that so far this month in the u.s. the cheapest gtx 680 sale ended at just over $100 and the average selling price of the 16 cards sold so far this month is a hundred and sixty dollars u.s. so you'd probably want to do better than 160 dollars u.s. to be honest that's only a 27% saving for these secondhand graphics card i'd personally set my price cap and around a hundred and twenty dollars us for a gtx 680 and if you can get a four gigabyte model well obviously do so but honestly your chances of snagging your gtx 680 today for less than $100 u.s. is well basically zero so be realistic with your expectations remember apart from being old and probably quite well used the gtx 680 also chugs quite a lot more power than a gtx 1050 TI so that means that the more modern 1052 i will likely run much cooler quieter and it won't ravage your power supply like at FX 95 90 trying to keep up with those fancy new AP use the smaller vm buffer can also be an issue at times unless you manage to get your hands on a 4 gigabyte gtx 680 which isn't necessarily that easy to do and that's going to do it for this one if you enjoyed the video be sure to hit the like button subscribe for more content if you appreciate the testing we do here at harbor and box then consider supporting us on patreon thanks for watching I'm your host Steve see you next time I'm impressed that didn't fall over