Gadgetory

well I never really did one of these videos for the Radeon HD 7970 and 7950 launches so I guess it's fitting that I get around to it now basically what I'm doing is my usual length and general physical comparisons between these various video cards so here the reasons I've chosen these particular cards for comparison or one the galaxy gtx 680 and the Radeon HD 7970 are sort of the the new kids on the block as far as high performance goes with the GTX 680 being the newest of all the cards here the GTX 590 and the Radeon HD 6990 are the last generation king of the hill cards both of them are dual GPU solutions that performance similarly especially once you overclock these these newer cards to these newer single GPU cards so we're gonna see what kind of in addition to the much better power characteristics of the 680 and the 7970 how much smaller physically they are than their previous generation brethren and the reason I'm including the GTX 580 is due to the fact that it it was a similarly positioned card to the 680 from the last generation so we want to see what improvements Nvidia is made on comparing the last generation single GPU to the current generation the single GPU of hard so the 680 is exactly 10 inches long one of the things I like about in videos reference cards is that they don't unnecessarily lengthen the card so you see how the PCB ends here and the cooler ends here this is something AMD just keeps doing and I can't fathom why they do this but check this out so the Radeon HD 7970 remember guys this information is important if you need to fit one of these cards in your case the 7970 is about 11 inches long now what kills me about that is you guys can see quite clearly here actually I hope you can see quite clearly here the PCB ends here so they've just got extra random plastic shroud about it looks like about a quarter of an inch of it right off the back of the card why you doing that I had trouble fitting it inside a shuttle XP C bare-bones due to that extra just little tiny bit of space I mean I did get it in so it wasn't the end of the world but it's just a little bit frustrating now in terms of the other aspects of the layouts of these cards these are both PCI Express 3.0 cards and they both have two power connectors however the gtx 680 due to its lower power consumption has two 6-pin power connectors in a unique stacked configuration so in videos theory about this is it will provide slightly better cable management as well as it buys as buy them more room on the PCB you can see here that in theory it uses up less space although you can yeah I don't know how much I believe that because you can also clearly see next to the stacked configuration there are six contact points from where we could have put a 6 pin connector right here anyway so yeah you know whatever but okay so in theory it gives them that and I mean maybe hey maybe it's working because they do have a significantly shorter card then the Radeon HD 7970 you can't really tell this is sort of poorly aligned in terms of the camera but these are sitting at the same spot so this is how much longer the 7970 is versus the gtx 680 so it has an 8 pin and a 6 pin now let's compare these to some last generation cards so here we go you know what let's focus on the 680 since it is the newest card here how long is it compared to a GTX 580 the 580 is slightly longer not by much oops oh sorry I'm having a little bit of trouble with my chest tripod today here guys there we go no I got it so at 10 and a half inches versus 10 inches there aren't too many cases where that half an inch is going to be the be-all and end-all the the actual difference in fact many cases are accepting graphics cards up to 12 inches no problem these days so it's something to be aware of but if you have a gaming case like any kind of decent case it's probably not the end of the world now the GTX 590 at 11 inches is one of the longest graphics cards ever produced you know for I guess you could call it mainstream but it isn't really but for for the general consumer it's got to 8bim power connectors compared to and this is a similarly performing card especially in scenarios like 3d vision we are definitely taking a step in the right direction not to mention the substantially improved power consumption that we get with the GTX 680 and finally the longest pure consumer card at a 1 foot long the radio in 69 90 so once again these are similarly performing cards but if you want to talk performance per inch the the 680 is looking pretty good and for that matter the 7970 looks pretty good too especially once you start overclocking it so to give you guys some context here I've just brought along the motherboard because yeah I can sort of measure these in terms of inches but that really doesn't help you eyeball whether they're gonna fit in your case so let's take the 79 70 and the GTX 680 in my chest tripods broken again here guys sorry about the shaky camera alright so you guys can visualize based on looking at your motherboard where it sits in your case and where the edge of your motherboard is see that so the 680 hangs just a little bit let's see how much it is looks like about a quarter of an inch little over a quarter of an inch over the edge of your motherboard so as long as you have that much clearance on the side of the board then you should be fine next we've got the 7970 which hangs about an inch and a quarter over the edge of a motherboard so they hopefully that helps guys and don't forget to subscribe - tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos