Gadgetory

now the purpose of this video is fairly simple because of its extremely scarce availability the GTX 690 you know isn't as popular as people would like for it to be there's lots of people out there I know this for a fact who want to buy a GTX 690 who want the ultimate performance but cannot find one in stock anywhere so I have one here today and I want to treat this video as sort of a a what can you do if you want ultimate performance and can't get a GTX 690 sort of video so it has come to my attention that depending on which retailer you look at NCIX not being the one that I'm referring to here a GTX 690 can go for as much as $1,200 which is almost exactly the price of Brie GTX 670 s so this is going to be a head-to-head comparison in my most recent my most recent suite of benchmarks between 3-way SLI GTX 670 s and a single GTX 690 I think we all probably know which one's likely to win at this point but in case you don't that is the purpose of doing these kinds of tests so I don't know if you can see my fraps meter in the corner look at that it's like exactly where the light is making it so you can't see it or whatever I'll tell you what it says so this is battlefield 3 all of the tests are going to be run at 1080p yes I am aware that 1080p isn't necessarily I actually don't know which way I'm going anymore I am aware that 1080p is not necessarily the ideal resolution for you know very high-end graphics card setups however I did notice that we do see scaling in some of the games that I've tested already where we're seeing more than double the performance in 3-way SLI as we're seeing with a single card so that is a very positive indicator I'm using the brand new driver from Nvidia released on May 22nd so this is there are 300 driver this is a wickel driver that supports on the GTX 670 and the GTX 690 you can see I'm getting about a hundred and hundred ninety five fps and battlefield through this is all an ultra setting so I'm going to be maxing out every game The Witcher 2 battlefield 3 the elder scrolls Skyrim and Crysis 2 and bringing you guys the numbers head-to-head between these two very ultimate II solutions now I had really wanted to test four-way SLI but I actually didn't realize that the 670 does not support four-way SLI so one of these cards is not on the bench and we're just going with these three so I have my reference card my galaxy card and my other more different galaxy card one that looks like this with the glowing logo P sweet so I'm finished my testing with the GTX 690 so in case you guys were wondering what a gtx 690 looks like on the test bench it's a little something like that it's pretty cool start off the lights you can see the glowing GeForce logo here glows very strongly that's a very cool as well he comes pretty toasty a little bit of coil line not too bad not as bad as my 680 or or any of my six 70s but not as good as 590 which have absolutely no coil line at least the one that I that I have um overall not that loud though about pretty similar to GTX 590 in terms of the actual fan speed still got a game running on it right now definitely quieter than the 3-way GTX 670 solution and consumes less power but remember it's two GPUs versus three GPUs cyanide ads I see that that's five video cards but I was only running three of them at a time so I'm just going to make up my little graphs and then we're good to go after I tell you the test bench of course so this is a Radeon our 3d land radio nothing core i7 3930k at 4.4 gigahertz with 16 gigs of kingston hyperx ram at ddr3 1600 megahertz I also have a muskan Chronos deluxe Drive in there and I've got my gigabyte is this thing it's a ga something rather x79 ud7 so this is up to a 4 Way SLI crossfire X capable motherboard that's all powered by an OC z ZX series 1250 watt power supply easily capable of powering those three GPUs actually you know what it saw 2 in the morning and I'm actually really tired so I'm not going to make graphs you guys you'll just have to bear with me so here we go I actually have an upcoming video where I plan to do some GTX 670 versus Radeon 7970 scaling which will be really cool so one two and three weight configurations for both seeing how they compare but for this one we're just looking at three x GTX 670 s versus a single GTX 690 what is the better better value proposition so you can see here in Crysis 2 the 3-way SLI configuration actually has a lower overall minimum but a higher overall average but not by much we're talking a 5 percent performance advantage in battlefield 3 the 6 the 3 by 670 solution just destroys the single 690 so this is excellent scaling that we're seeing in this particular game I mean we've got an additional 25 to 30 percent performance probably about 25 percent performance from adding that additional GPU so that is a pretty good example of excellent scaling then you can see the minimum is even higher that's more like 40 percent outstanding skyrim yeah those look pretty similar to me within margin of error on this side however that minimum frame rate is very different so the GTX 690 was a actual 3-way SLI configuration with about 35 percent higher than the GTX 690 in terms of minimum fps and I did notice that when I was actually using it Witcher 2 is another one that scaled okay in terms of averages with the 3 by GTX 670 configuration but the minimum was a little bit lower well quite a bit lower but something to bear in mind about these minimums is sometimes when you benchmarking your frame rates will dip for sort of no reproducible or easily explainable reason and so there's a little bit about to bear in mind as well personally I know minimums are important to a lot of people but personally I put more weight into the averages especially because of the way I'm collecting data with fraps you can get a minimum that gets you know if both cards dip like this you can get one of them that records at the very bottom of the dip because it happens to fall on that split second and one of them that falls here but that doesn't mean the dip didn't happen so something to bear in mind about fraps framerate recording so thank you for checking out my 3-way GTX 670 versus GTX 690 performance review I think that we can see that three each by GTX 670 is a very viable option if you really do want the ultimate performance and you can't get your hands on one of these bad boys don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips