 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, 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 $1200, which is almost exactly the price of three GTX 670s. So this is going to be a head to head comparison in my most recent, in my most recent suite of benchmarks between three way SLI GTX 670s 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 there. Look at that. It's like exactly where the light is making it see. You can't see it. 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 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 three 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 their R300 driver. This is a Wickel driver that supports the GTX 670 and the GTX 690. You can see I'm getting about 195 FPS in Battlefield 3. This is all in ultra settings. 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-y 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. The one that looks like this with the glowing logo. Pretty sweet. So I 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. Looks pretty cool. Let's turn off the lights. You can see the glowing GeForce logo here. Goes very strongly and looks very cool as well. Looks pretty toasty. Little bit of coil line, not too bad. Not as bad as my 680 or any of my 670s but not as good as 590 which had absolutely no coil line at least the one that I have. Overall not that loud though. 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 2 GPUs versus 3 GPUs. I see that that's 5 video cards but I was only running 3 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, or Radeon, Radeon nothing. 4i7 3930K at 4.4 GHz with 16GB of Kingston HyperX RAM at DDR3 1600 MHz. I also have a Mushkin Kronos Deluxe drive in there and I've got my Gigabyte, what is this thing, it's a GA something or other, X79 UD7. So this is up to a 4-way SLI Crossfire X capable motherboard and it's all powered by an OCZ ZX Series 1250W power supply. Easily capable of powering those 3 GPUs. Actually you know what, it's 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 1, 2 and 3-way configurations for both seeing how they compare. But for this one we're just looking at 3 times GTX 670 versus a single GTX 690, what is the better value proposition. So you can see here in Crisis 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% performance advantage. In Battlefield 3 the 3x670 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 25-30% performance, probably about 25% performance from adding that additional GPU. So that is a pretty good example of excellent scaling there and you can see the minimum is even higher, that's more like 40% 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 actually, well the 3-way SLI configuration was about 35% 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 3x 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're benchmarking your frame rates will dip for sort of no reproducible or easily explainable reason and so there's a little bit of that 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, 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 frame rate recording. So thank you for checking out my 3-way GTX 670 versus GTX 690 performance review. I think that we can see that 3x 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 learn this tech tips.