Gadgetory

in 2018 it is still the year of Pascal with the GTX 10 atti being a grabs card that is pretty much desired by any gamer if you do or don't have it however last year I did pick up two GTX 690 s and I got them for a very good price and SLI being something that is not popular nowadays I decided to put them together to make what would technically be quite SLI so essentially a GTX 690 is two gtx 680 dies on one PCB and when you put two of them together you technically have Quad SLI or for GPU dies running in sync to play your games though the problems with running an SLI configuration are well documented with blue screens happening a lot of the time that's even in a dual card configuration here we have four GPUs running in sync and the problems were quite bad that was so bad to the point where I didn't even dare try to use shadow player and he captures when I was running these tests because I was already getting chronic blue screening in a lot of the games so getting these results here I did manage to run benchmarks however in normal operation I would not recommend anyone run Quad SLI just for the sake of not losing your sanity though all problems aside the max potential of this configuration is actually quite impressive with the initial firestrike score showing that of something that is coming close to the 1080 TI now keep in mind you do have a 4 gigabyte vram buffer on one of these cards coupled together you have a gigabytes in total however only two gigabytes is usable in practically any game out there and so that does create a limitation on the potential of these grabs cards not to mention the games the drivers and also everything in between does limit these cards quite a lot however I decided to pick out a few games that did support what SLI and the results will show that it is indeed just like that 5 strikes score coming close to the potential of a 1080 Ti so let's take a look at how well these two gtx 690 s fare in some of these titles welcome back to take yesterday's Brian coming to you guys today with that video on these two gtx 690 s now I did configure this on a z3 70 motherboard within 8700 K o'clock to 5 gigahertz so the CPU on that side of things is not going to limit the potential of these cards at all even at 1080p gaming of course we have the 1080 TI from EVGA this is a beast of a graphics card it's actually overclocked out of the factory and considering the overclocks I didn't decide to touch any of the other clocks especially on the 6 90s where they're already getting very hot out of the factory even on a hundred percent fan speeds I was seeing mid 80 degree temperatures on the stock clocks so I decided not to overclock anything and the power consumption it even confused my water meter where the point where was like saying it was around 400 watts in the flash strike combined test but I know that's complete crap it'd be anywhere from around nine hundred to a thousand watts now I did test this with a 1000 watt rmx power supply from Corsair so the power supply was okay in handling these tests but besides that mammoth fire strike score I did manage to find a few games especially the first one we're pulling up here Crysis 3 that did showcase the true potential of these grabs cards Crysis 3 is a game that is a couple of years old now however it was scaling over 90% a lot of the times this was at 1080p with the settings virtually maxed out and the vram buffer was holding up quite well in this game and the frame rates were kind of actually impressive we were getting around 122 fps on average with the point one percent lows actually not being low at all we're getting over ninety FPS on those point one percent Louis contrast that to the 1080 TI of course this was a beast of a Grammy Scott scoring 177 average fps and 0.1% low of a hundred and sixty-one so it was a very impressive showcase from the GTX 1080 Ti however the GTX 690 s were putting on quite a show in Crysis 3 and the results continued over to battlefield one where at 1080p high settings I decided to test the minigun scene which was pretty consistent and getting an average of around 120 FPS where the 0.1% low that was still above 80 FPS so quite an impressive feat in battlefield 1 to keep in mind Crysis 3 and battlefield 1 a games that are very well optimized for PC contrasting that to the 1080 Ti we saw this thing was near 200 FPS a lot of the times with a point one percent low that was still extremely impressive so both these two games that I've shown you here the GTX 690 s did do very well and there was really no noticeable stuttering at all however after these two titles things did start to take a turn for the worst moving on to Metro last light a game which I thought supported Quad SLI really well actually didn't turning this on dx11 showed an average FPS of 73 with the minimum of 24 however when we moved out of DX 10 we could then inject MSI Afterburner and see what was going on we had scaling here there was around about 50 to 60 percent on only three cards the fourth card was just sitting there doing nothing the DX 10 results did give a better result of 95 average FPS with a minimum of 29 comparing that to the 1080 Ti that's got 204 average FPS with a minimum of 33 so it did do very well in Metroid last like probably that minimum is due to a CPU intense scene as he saw the minimums compared to the 1080i quite well there really for what it's worth it wasn't that bad of experience on the 6 90s the one we moved over to Tomb Raider this was the one that shocked me the most yes the cards were all working and on dx11 we were getting scaling around about 35% the dips were absolutely horrible in this game we scored 44 average FPS at 1080p high settings with a minimum of 4 fps going over to the 1080i that did 173 and 65 minimum I even had shadow play recording on the 1080 Ti so this one was a clear fail for the 6 90s moving over to DX 12 on this game it was even worse I've never seen this in a game things were just coming in and out and just blinking it was just a horrible experience though the scaling did seem to do a little bit better at though for what it's worth the vram buffer I think was limiting in this title but as well as just the bad optimization for Quad SLI and you can't really put that on the game developer because I don't think anyone really wants to use Quad SLI in this day and age they're now moving on to an interesting title GTA 5 I thought this was relatively uh knocked my for PC especially compared to some of the other titles I've talked about but it really surprised me we're getting over 80% scaling in Grand Theft Auto 5 and that was across all four cards on high settings at 1080p it was a really smooth experience I was shocked we're getting 140 average FPS within point 1 percent low of 131 this is when I test around the section where I just walk along the highway though when I did jump in the car and start driving around the city there was some pretty bad stuttering however ironically enough that was still present on the 1080 TI there were some stutters there and that's due to the game I think braking apparently when you've got too high of an FPS figure now of course I couldn't really up any of the settings because once we start going over that 2 gigabyte vram limit things just start choking out an example of this of course is pub G even at 1080p where the settings are shocking though we'll get onto that a little bit later but GTA 5 it was a really good experience one that I could actually play on GTX 690 s in Quad SLI and still have a really good time however what about a more modern title well I decided to test destiny 2 which I can't unfortunately inject my river tuna or MSI Afterburner into so I can't really see what's going on live but looking at the average FPS here which is a decent indicator of how well the performance or coupled that with my eyes and seeing what's going on destiny 2 actually played really well on two of these graphics cards because after I loaded up afterburner after the fact I could see that only two GPUs were supported in destiny 2 but it was still a very smooth experience the average FPS in this game was going well over a hundred FPS and it was around about a hundred and 60 average fps in this title this was at 1080p high settings stepping this up to 4k surprisingly still gave us decent experience on this 690 where we're getting close to 60 FPS at 4k so it was still playable and the stuttering and dips there was practically none at 1080p though at 4k it really did start having some problems I did start seeing some kind of flickering and crazy behavior on the six 90s of course the 1080 TI being a fantastic experience that was pretty much pegged at 200 FPS at 1080p which is the max limit on this game and then a 4k we're still getting over a hundred FPS at practically all times so great experience on the 1080 HD a decent experience at 1080p on the 690 s 4k I wouldn't recommend them all the last title we're gonna pull up here now is pub G and this really shows why Quad SLI is not favorable at all in modern-day titles only one graphics card is supported in this game and it ran terrible on the 690 or at least the 680 because that's essentially what it is now in this game with the 2 gigabyte variant buffer this was a 1080p medium settings and we were just joking we were getting point one percent lows that we're hitting zero fps it was just unplayable on this resolution which 1080p should be playable on a 680 with just the two gigabyte vram buffer even on medium settings it should be fine but it's not fine on the 690 so something clearly was going wrong with this game the optimization was just terrible the good thing was at least I didn't blue screen however contrasting that to the 1080 TI that was scoring near 144 FPS at most times the point one percent lows were above a hundred and I couldn't figure out now with this game how to break that 144 Hertz cap I think with the new version they've implemented a locked mechanism so if you guys know how to break that limit in the new version of pop G then please let us know in the comment section below but any guys when it comes down to it if you want to do SLI I would recommend getting cards with a bigger vram buffer like for instance if you're going with the GTX 770 and you want to do two of them in SLI perhaps think about getting two 770's with the 4 gigabyte vram buffer that will actually give you a decent experience a lot of the titles will support two cards four cards however I just really isn't happening and there's only a few games that will support Quad SLI and even then it's a really hard time getting him to work properly you do have to tweak the settings and you do have to make sure that your car's not gonna crash out not to mention you will need a beastly power supply so if what it's worth in 2018 I wouldn't go for anything more than two graphics cards though this six 90s did put on a very impressive display I was kind of shocked with the max potential of these cards the fire strike score really showed that it was coming close to that 1080i it was really just let down by its own two gigabyte vm buffer and of course the games and drivers not being optimized a lot of the times for Quad SLI and now here's another thing that I'm gonna talk about before I get on out of here when I put these cards in after the 1080i things worked well but when I put my 1070 TI back in and started to try and edit videos I was still copying a lot of blue screens and yes I did ddu I did reinstall the drivers again but things are just still crashing and they're still terrible so I will probably have to reinstall my whole system because there's just reg edits that have happened and they've just messed up this whole system especially when it comes to Adobe Premiere Pro and video editing I'm getting blue screens in that and that's making video editing very tough so if you want to go with Quad SLI be warned you should expect some headaches as well when I was doing this testing I had to put the monitor at 1080p and cut off the second monitor so I only had it with one monitor I found that kept things relatively stable but yeah in 2018 Quad SLI is pretty much a no-no but one GTX 690 should do really well in a lot of titles providing you account for that - you could buy a VRAM buffer even though it's got four gigabytes you're gonna be having that because it's got to GPU dies on the PCB I knew guys in closing out I'm sorry it took so long to get this video done I did make a previous video a story telling about the problems I faced getting these things installed and also ironically enough when I was trying to get things working my motherboard had some problems of its own which was unrelated to the graphics cards itself so yeah it was just a nightmare getting this actual testing done but I'm glad I did get it done because people can see that the hardware is being limited by a lot of the time to the games a lot of the games in 2018 some of the times they just horribly unoptimized take for example pub G I'm sorry to say as fun as that game is it is terribly optimized the Xbox and the consoles are really a testament to how bad things can get when a game is not properly optimized but ultimately with these two gtx 690 s for some reason i don't know what it is I just love these cards I don't want to let them go I don't even want to put them in a build and sell them I think they're gonna go up on the shelves and just be placeholders because I just love the look of them and they're just such a cool card I think they were the last geforce card where nvidia did the two dies on one PCB yes there was the titan z but the titan series has never really been for gamers in general these were sort of those cards that did have that option of being really cool at the time which is kind of an oxymoron I meant like cool like is in the look of them and also the fact that they were like two gtx 680 s but i did pick these two cards up for an absolute bargain so i guess that's where these sentimental attachments coming from they kind of remind me you just got to keep hustling and get them deals if you were to go out and buy one of these on ebay they are overpriced in my opinion and of course they're not really that good as a dedicated graphics card especially for the price there's much better options out there so yeah I don't know what it is about these cards I guess people just want to get one and create a sentimental attachment to them - of course they did have that mod if you're into soldiering where you could essentially turn it into a Quadro card which is much more expensive than the 690 and then you would be using it in the professional field and getting really good performance out of these things especially if you're like a CAD editor or you're into 3d editing so I guess that's where the price of these things come up as well as the fact that they could be used in Mac if you were into flashing them as well so good card but ultimately in Quad SLI not really something that I'd recommend or actually something that I would stay away from with a 10-foot Pole anyway guys hope you enjoyed today's video if you didn't be sure to hit that like button let me know in the comment section below if there's any of those broken promises that you want to get pushed up to the top q and I'll make it happen for you guys and I'll catch you in another tech video very soon peace out for now bye