OFFICIAL KEPLER "GTX680" Reviews

[Despoiler]

I'm unimpressed by the reviews. It's clear from these first reviews that none of the reviewers are making clock per clock comparisons. I'd suspect that Nvidia has a hand in that. Nvidia's lead in a lot of cases comes down to the fact that the card is clocked 75-133mhz higher than AMD's part. I'm not seeing anything to be excited about except that consumers now have competition to drive prices down.

 

[Don Karnage]

Wtf did I just read this right, you can NOT disable dynamic overclocking?

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_680/31.html

Despite all the GTX 680 does right, I'm not thrilled about this. Unngh. I like manual controls. Boo.

Also it can't be true that 7870 has a higher perf/watt than 680 can it? According to TPU it does. I was going to buy the most efficient chip all else equal, I didn't expect 7870 to do that well. Hmm. Gonna see where prices settle down because price/perf obviously has to change, especially on the AMD side where they overpriced everything.

I'd love to see some 200 dollar 7870's

 

[Don Karnage]

I'm unimpressed by the reviews. It's clear from these first reviews that none of the reviewers are making clock per clock comparisons. I'd suspect that Nvidia has a hand in that. Nvidia's lead in a lot of cases comes down to the fact that the card is clocked 75-133mhz higher than AMD's part.

Here come the excuses.

680 is 50 dollars cheaper yet still beats down the 7970. Where's my Violin....

 

[Zebo]

Wtf did I just read this right, you can NOT disable dynamic overclocking?

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_680/31.html

Despite all the GTX 680 does right, I'm not thrilled about this. Unngh. I like manual controls. Boo.

Also it can't be true that 7870 has a higher perf/watt than 680 can it? According to TPU it does. I was going to buy the most efficient chip all else equal, I didn't expect 7870 to do that well. Hmm. Gonna see where prices settle down because price/perf obviously has to change, especially on the AMD side where they overpriced everything.

Sure you can't. Let me in that bios for 20 seconds I'll show you how. Don't worry it'll be done.

 

[badb0y]

^ I would suggest to hold a few days there's bound to be a price cut if your aiming to buy a 7870.

 

[CFP]

I'm unimpressed by the reviews. It's clear from these first reviews that none of the reviewers are making clock per clock comparisons. I'd suspect that Nvidia has a hand in that. Nvidia's lead in a lot of cases comes down to the fact that the card is clocked 75-133mhz higher than AMD's part.

Yes, and that matters because the underlying architecture, and therefore performance-per-clock, is identical!!!

 

[chimaxi83]

Sure you can't. Let me in that bios for 20 seconds I'll show you how. Don't worry it'll be done.

TPU review also states the clock and voltage limits are not only at the driver level, but at the hardware level.

Doesn't mean modified or new drivers/bios won't do the trick, though.

 

[HurleyBird]

Anyone seen an AF flower test yet?

 

[slayernine]

Well as much as I would like AMD to be GPU king I'm very happy to see the 680 come out in full force because there will inevitably be a sizeable price drop on AMD products

Good thing I didn't buy a shiny new 7970 just yet.

 

[Lepton87]

Wtf did I just read this right, you can NOT disable dynamic overclocking?

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_680/31.html

Despite all the GTX 680 does right, I'm not thrilled about this. Unngh. I like manual controls. Boo.

Also it can't be true that 7870 has a higher perf/watt than 680 can it? According to TPU it does. I was going to buy the most efficient chip all else equal, I didn't expect 7870 to do that well. Hmm. Gonna see where prices settle down because price/perf obviously has to change, especially on the AMD side where they overpriced everything.

It's really frustrating that none of the sites is doing direct OC comparisons because it's not in the reviewers guide and that would make nvidia card look bad

Why not? 7870 is amds purely gaming card. tahiti and gk104 were not meant to be competitors until nvidia decided to screw its consumers by releasing mid-range card at high-end prices. tahiti is multipurpose as opposed to purely gaming centric GK104, that's why it's at a disadvantage in performance per mm2.

 

[utahraptor]

Sure you can't. Let me in that bios for 20 seconds I'll show you how. Don't worry it'll be done.

I can imagine you at drag strip about to race your red car against someone's green car. "Let me take a wrench to your engine for about 20 seconds so the race will be fair." "I know your engine has only 195 hp vs my 220 hp, but still I need the wrench work under your hood to make this fair."

 

[GaiaHunter]

NVIDIA played their cards well with a the GTX680 being a very good card with excellent stock performance for its price, die size and power consumption.

AMD and AIBs will have to start upping those clocks and/or dropping prices a bit (depending on availability of the GTX680 compared to the 7970).

This should make some more powerful cards (again depending on availability) enter the $200-300 price segment that I generally buy.

 

[Lepton87]

It's really frustrating that none of the review sites is doing direct OC comparisons because it's not in the reviewers guide and it would make gk104 look worse than tahiti.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Heh, no, I was being mildly sarcastic here NV obviously changed their approach by neutering this card of compute performance, so in reality, the die size can't really be fairly compared to GTX580 with the conclusion being smaller die = not a direct replacement.

They named it a GTX680, after all, not a 660Ti.

The only thing they changed was when it came to market. Typically the GF100/110 big die would come first, then these cards that are made specifically for gaming.. They can't turn GK104 into their workstation card, they still need GF100/110 for it.

GK104 is GF114 doubled, cuda lost hot clocks so after doubling the cuda cores because of the loss of hot clocks, they doubled them again to keep the performance.

Ananda did a great review and has a ton of information there, I suggest reading it. Basically GF114 (which also has limited GPGPU) is GK114, improved. 384x2 = 768 cuda cores, but with hot clocks, without hot clocks you need twice as many cores.. 768x2 = 1536 cuda cores = GK104... Double everything else to feed the increased cores and you have a slightly redesigned GF114 riding the $500 price point instead of the $250 price point. This was huge for Nvidia and AMD paved the way for them.

Looking to the future, GK100 will probably end up looking something like double GF110, only with 2048 cuda cores. The big question is how much time they're going to spend refining and revising it. They'll need to work it down a bit because GK104 has a high TDP for a mid range card...

 

[Grooveriding]

Availability looks to be zilch. All sold out on newegg already. I noticed when they went up on ncix as well, where you can accurately check stock, that they had anywhere from 6(evga) to up to 20(galaxy) in stock at the time of them going up.

I think availability is super low on the 680. I should of bought a few and put them on ebay, could of probably paid for half of one of them with the markup

 

[Maximilian]

Impressive card! I would be pissed if I had bought a 7xxx recently

Pricing on the GTX680 is bollocks but at least its the same as the 580 at launch and better than AMD's current 7xxx pricing

 

[blastingcap]

Why not? 7870 is amds purely gaming card. tahiti and gk104 were not meant to be competitors until nvidia decided to screw its consumers by releasing mid-range card at high-end prices. tahiti is multipurpose as opposed to purely gaming centric GK104, that's why it's at a disadvantage in performance per mm2.

Um why are you quoting me as saying something I didn't say? That last sentence was not mine.

Anyway, I will have to look further into the 7870 vs 680 because the 680 just made 79xx irrelevant for me, assuming AMD drops prices all down the line. As someone else said, a 7870 for $200 would be nice....

 

[Zebo]

I can imagine you at drag strip about to race your red car against someone's green car. "Let me take a wrench to your engine for about 20 seconds so the race will be fair." "I know your engine has only 195 hp vs my 220 hp, but still I need the wrench work under your hood to make this fair."

I usually modify bios in my cards. More volts, no throttle, mem timings. Basically yeah I modify everything I own. Trust me this card has the switches for this dynamic Ocing in bios.

 

[Covrich]

I am impressed! I hope this has subsequent price adjustments on the AMD range in particular 7870 range which I have my eye on.

At least we have some healthy competition now.

I have been on the market for a new card for weeks now because my old gpu packed up.. And I am glad I held off and used a temp old one in my newish PC.. I don't normally hold off but it is about to get a bit more interesting.

 

[Don Karnage]

Impressive card! I would be pissed if I had bought a 7xxx recently

Pricing on the GTX680 is bollocks but at least its the same as the 580 at launch and better than AMD's current 7xxx pricing

What's with all the whining about the prices? Its faster then a 7970 and cheaper to boot. Everyone should be mad at amd for overpricing their cards

 

[notty22]

It's really frustrating that none of the review sites is doing direct OC comparisons because it's not in the reviewers guide and it would make gk104 look worse than tahiti.

I get your frustrated. You seem to know the reviewers guide ?
Here is some good information on overclocking the new gtx 680
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_680/31.html


After some great insight the bottom line.

Maximum stable clocks of our card are 1159 MHz GPU / +153 MHz clock offset (15% overclock) and 1833 MHz Memory (22% overclock). (HD 7970 review: +16% / +25%)

Both overclocks are great, especially seeing memory overclock so far is nice. Previous Fermi generation GPUs did much worse here. It's also good to see that there is still some headroom left in the cards for manual tweaking and dynamic OC didn't eat up the whole OC potential.

So even when both cards are manually tweaked to deliver maximum performance, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 is still on top. Overclocking the Radeon HD 7970 does give it a nice performance boost though, which allows it to surpass the out-of-the-box GTX 680 experience.

 

[ShadowOfMyself]

NV obviously changed their approach by neutering this card of compute performance, so in reality, the die size can't really be fairly compared to GTX580 with the conclusion being smaller die = not a direct replacement.

Bingo... I dont get why everyone is ignoring this point

I was impressed at first but reading AT's review and seeing how this card gets smacked around in compute, it all becomes obvious... (and less impressive)

When you think the 7970 can actually match the 680 while also having all that compute power on just a slightly bigger die, it makes you realize how great it really is

Now before the green team jumps me, yes, we are gamers and we dont care about compute, so in that sense AMD made a bad decision... I wonder what the 7970 would be like if it were a pure gamer card with proper clocks as well...

Then again, it sounds like the true 28nm battle will take place later this year with GK110 vs Tenerife, I cant wait

 

[Maximilian]

What's with all the whining about the prices? Its faster then a 7970 and cheaper to boot. Everyone should be mad at amd for overpricing their cards

Being cheaper than something that is overpriced dosent make it a good price. Not knocking the GTX680 but nvidias prices have never been all that good at the high end.

Give me the awesome performance at £200 like i got with the 5850 a couple of years back, that was a good price :thumbsup:

 

[Lepton87]

I get your frustrated. You seem to know the reviewers guide ?
Here is some good information on overclocking the new gtx 680
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_680/31.html

Their 7970 overclocked unusually bad, wonder how it would looked like vs tahiti at 1250.
It seems that it doesn't matter which card you choose, it's luck of the draw how fast your card will be, because those cards are equal at the same clocks and achieve very similar clocks.

 

[utahraptor]

I usually modify bios in my cards. More volts, no throttle, mem timings. Basically yeah I modify everything I own. Trust me this card has the switches for this dynamic Ocing in bios.

I do see the value in modifying the bios to dial the perfect hardware based overclock for non nonsense no driver setting full time use, but I don't think reviewers should have to mess with it for an official apples to apples comparison.