Gadgetory

well it's semi-formal review time again guys this is the geforce gtx 680 from galaxy this is the new flagship single GPU graphics card from nvidia by our friends at galaxy this is a 2 gigabyte frame buffer over 1 gigahertz core clock and over 6 gigahertz memory clock graphics card it has 2 6 pin power connectors it has a PCI Express 3.0 16x slot is compatible with the variety of SLI configurations that are available using these 2 SLI ports and it is on the latest manufacturing process enabling it to be phenomenally power efficient and my camera won't focus and perform like the bee's knees and supposedly although I have not yet tested this card it also over clocks like like whoa like pretty good so in terms of cards that I'm going to be testing against I have a total of seven cards to be tested so I've got these 7970 from AMD this is a stock bone reference card to be compared against the reference gtx 680 I have a sapphire HD 7950 so this is an aftermarket card you're going to see this one strengths when we get to things like the acoustics and temperature testing that's going to be a separate video though this is the performance video we've got the GTX 590 this is a last generation dual GPU card to compare against the current generation single GPU card 6990 so this is a last generation dual GPU card from AMD then I want to compare the 680 against the 580 as well as the previous generation gtx 570 so that we can see where it falls in terms of the overall performance stack now you see 3d vision glasses there that's going to be a separate review this is going to be my 2d performance at 1080p review since that is what the majority of monitors are supporting these days that is what we are going to be focused on how now I did change a couple things so instead of using my normal benchmarking settings for the games that I ran I did alter things a little bit so for battlefield 3 I'm using the ultra preset for Crysis 2 I'm using Ultra Plus high-res textures which or two is ultra plus the vsync is off dirt 3 is 4 times anti-aliasing with high and ultra where available Batman Arkham City is going to be using four times multi sample anti-aliasing this is important which kind of anti-aliasing I'm using because this new card supports a couple of modes of anti aliasing that have some distinct advantage TxAA and FXAA but we are not going to be using those for the purposes of this review this will be apples to apples PhysX off ok and Skyrim will be at Ultra with four times MS AAA x AF vsync forced off through the ini file and the high res texture pack the official high res texture pack you can see I've actually finished the benchmarks for all the other cards this takes forever guys it takes absolutely forever and you can also see a sneak peak of all the different scenarios I'm planning to run 1080p review I yes my test bench so this is my LGA 2011 test bench with a 36 30 K 3030 3930k 3930k this is running at stock speed so I haven't made any changes to that guy right there 16 gigs of Kingston HyperX memory and Asus p9 x79 deluxe motherboard as well as a corsair h 100 for my boot SSD I'm using a muskan Chronos deluxe my steam drive is running off here and for my power supply using an OC z ZX series 12 50 watt modular power supply that pretty much covers it for the test bench itself and it is time to start testing this card because yes that is the line that is still blank has not yet been on the test bench I'll be using the latest drivers on all cards so that is 12.2 for the AMD cards and then the home on which one is this I'll have to look because it's going to be a different driver for the new card than it is for the other card so 296 point 10 for every GeForce card except the 680 which will be using the 300 point whatever it is sorry for the long intro guys here we go here's Rumble investigating my test bench while the GTX 680 runs 3dmark 11 my first test of the night from Bratz he is Oh stepping on a 6990 get off there go on get get here we are in the middle of a combined test so to give you guys some idea how power efficiency sky is check this out it's pulling less than 280 watts from the wall so that's probably around 250 watts of actual power consumption with the six core processor high-end single graphics card and throughout all of this thing is darn near silent as well but more on that later a score of 31 72 puts it right in line with the rest of our whip 5 the GTX 590 in 3d mark 11 although significantly behind the 6990 let's see how things go in real world gameplay scenarios so as I always do I'm using oh I guess I shouldn't say always because dirt3 is using a canned benchmark in Batman Arkham City is using a canned benchmark battlefield 3 is using my usual run-through of the comrades beginning of the comrades level Crysis 2 is using my usual run-through of the first camp in Crysis 2 The Witcher 2 is using a run-through where I go up a little hill I fight some guys go through a building and then come into a courtyard where I fight some other guys and Skyrim the town is called white white run I think something like that and I do a couple laps of white run looking at some people looking at some fire looking around so stay tuned for real-world gaming benchmarks and the first results are in so while posting power results that are very similar to the incredibly powerful 79-78 posts also better average framerate and the same minimum frame rate compared to the 7970 it actually performs similarly to the GTX 590 once again while consuming over a hundred and fifty watts less power at the wall something to note here is due to the very high graphical settings both the 580 and the 570 kind of choked on this benchmark so you can see there is an enormous difference between this new generation premium card and the last generation 1 now Crysis 2 is less of a clear win against the lower price 7970 but it is still a win nonetheless so it takes the performance crown again in Crysis 2 something that I've known at this point is that this is actually the first reference geforce card that i've encountered that does have coil whines so it's a little bit of a high-pitched noise that you experience under load with the card and i'm talking about in games not in folding at home or anything like that this is something that i've experienced on pretty much every reference AMD card for the last few generations but hadn't seen on a geforce card as yet so the 680 does does exhibit this noise exhibited um make it the witcher 2 looks like a tight battle between the 7970 in terms of average FPS and the gtx 680 but in actuality you can see my notes here from when i was testing this 30fps which is considered sort of the minimum of playable was very unpayable felt very laggy whereas this 30 f/32 FPS actually felt significantly better so so yeah that puts the gtx 680 as far as a single card solutions go definitely at the top this is another title where the last generation products from nvidia the 580 and the 570 really struggled whether that's due to having less video memory remember the new card has two gigs versus 1.5 and 1.28 on those older cards and also has significantly more power but uses a similar amount of power since I haven't shown you guys my Skyrim test sequence before I'll take this opportunity to do that so I'm just running around this town following the same path every time looking off into the distance a little bit I always stop and look down at this camp for a couple seconds running very smoothly although I did see a flicker there yeah there's another one so I've experienced flickering now on the 6990 7970 and and this card out of all the cards that were tested I've seen this flickering on three of them so that's very frustrating definitely detracts from gameplay now I could probably get the flickering to go away by changing some graphical settings on any of those given cards but since what I'm trying to do is find a similarly demanding situation for each of the cards I don't really want to change any settings and I stop and look at this guard for a second stop and look at this guard first I can get my cat to go away and then off we go around again so while I'm doing the second lap I'll talk about some other things so first of all is my power testing methodology I don't know if you guys can see it through the camera yeah you can you can see my power meter so what I'm doing is well in benchmarking I'm keeping an eye on that and what I'm looking for is sort of something along the lines of a consistent peak so if I see it spiked to 320 once but then you know otherwise hover more around the when it's when it's under high load around the 300 watt range 305 watt range then that's where I'll take the reading for that card yeah it's very approximate let's see this one I'd probably go with 305 based on what I've seen so far that's something that that's a peak that I've hit several times so you can see skyrim isn't running a hundred percent correctly on this card maybe that's in part due to the early drivers could be settings I also want oh yeah so yeah power and temperatures instead of measuring power and temps with like a synthetic benchmark what I'm doing is I'm looking at it in all of the applications that I'm testing in order to get a good solid average so this benchmarks done you can tell because the fraps killer has reappeared so I'll definitely have to make some notes about the flickering on this one and let's go have a look at the results temperature monitoring is done using msi afterburner so I'm looking for the peak temperature which looks like it was 77 here which is consistent with all the other ones this kind of stands to reason because what the gtx 680 does is it actually uses its thermal thermal envelope to determine how much power to throw at a particular game so it'll actually scale its clock speed let me see if if afterburner is correctly I look at that it is monitoring core clock whoops oh no I don't think it's monitoring that correctly well let's not worry about that for now then I know that EVGA precision is already updated for the GTX 680 but none of the other applications are right now so 680 comes right oh hold on maybe there was another card yeah flickering on the 590 the 6990 and the 79 70 looks like all of the all the king performers flickering um had the same issue with this game so there there you have it so it's the 685 95 85 70 69 . 90-79 70 and 79 50 so this is in terms of sheer performance a clear win for the GTX 680 where it actually beats out everything in this test by a slim margin including the GTX 590 it definitely felt significantly smoother during use and once again that impressive power consumption is right there and we're done here Batman Arkham City which ironically is the way it's meant to be played title is the first game we've seen where the GTX 680 is actually outperformed by the Radeon HD 7970 could be driver issues because one thing I noticed here is that the power consumption of the card was significantly lower than it was in the other games so what that means to me is maybe the GPU core clock isn't scaling in order to to reach its maximum TDP or maybe there's some driver optimizations they can squeeze some more performance out of this game I guess we will have to wait and see so just a reminder this is the 680 the 590 the 580 the 570 this 6990 the 7970 and the 79 50 which is almost equal with the GTX 680 in this particular title so that pretty much concludes my performance benchmarks so here we go I'm just gonna freeze frame for you guys yeah I could make graphs but I really don't think that's likely to happen Oh idle power so idle power all of these new generation cards the 680 as well as the 79 70 in the 79 50 are significant improvements over their last generation brethren in terms of idle power idle temperatures remain for the most part fairly similar though so let's go ahead and start hiding row so in review there's the cards and battlefield 3 as including the power and temperatures of all of these games and we can go ahead and hide those ones there's Crysis 2 including power temperature min Max and average numbers The Witcher 2 so there is our power temps min max average remember guys this was completely unplayable whether that's a driver issue or whatever else this 30 was not playable unlike the 32 here next we've got dirt three Batman Arkham City which was a Radeon dominated test this time around well other than the 590 but whatever guys alright and finally Skyrim which had weird flickering on these four cards and was otherwise fairly normal so thank you for checking out my performance review of the geforce gtx 680 and a single card configuration at 1080p with high / ultimate or ultra graphic settings on a variety of games don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more out-of-focus videos just like this one and thank you for watching