 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 two 6-pin power connectors. It has a PCI Express 3.0 16x slot. It is compatible with the variety of SLI configurations that are available using these two 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 overclocks like... Like, whoa. Like, pretty good. So, in terms of cards that I'm going to be testing against, I have a total of 7 cards to be tested. So, I've got the 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's 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. Witcher 2 is Ultra plus the V-Sync is off. Witcher 3 is 4x anti-aliasing with high and Ultra where available. Batman Arkham City is going to be using 4x 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, okay. And Skyrim will be at Ultra with 4x MSAA, 8x AF, V-Sync 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 peek of all the different scenarios I'm planning to run. 1080p review. Ah, yes, my test bench. So, this is my LGA 2011 test bench with a 3630K. 30, 30, 39, 30K. 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 in ASUS P9X79 Deluxe motherboard, as well as, of course, their H100. For my boot SSD, I'm using a Mushkin Khronos Deluxe. My Steam Drive is running off here, and for my power supply, I'm using an OCZ ZX Series 1250W 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...hold 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 cards. So, 296.10 for every GeForce card, except the 680, which we'll 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. What a brat he is. Oh, he's stepping on a 690. Get off there. Go on. Get. Here we are in the middle of a combined test. So to give you guys some idea how power efficient this guy 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 6-core processor, high-end single graphics card, and throughout all of this, the thing is darn near silent as well, but more on that later. A score of 3172 puts it right in line with the GTX 590 in 3DMark 11, although significantly behind the 690. Let's see how things go in real-world gameplay scenarios. So as I always do, I'm using, well, I guess I shouldn't say always because Dirt 3 is using a canned benchmark and Batman Arkham City is using a canned benchmark. Battlefield 3 is using my usual run-through of the Comrades, beginning of the Comrades level. Crisis 2 is using my usual run-through of the first camp in Crisis 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 Whiterun, I think, something like that, and I do a couple laps of Whiterun, 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 power-efficient 7970, it posts also better average frame rate and the same minimum frame rate compared to the 7970. It actually performs similarly to the GTX 590, once again, while consuming over 150 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 one now. Crisis 2 is less of a clear win against the lower-priced 7970, but it is still a win nonetheless, so it takes the performance crown again in Crisis 2. Something that I've noticed at this point is that this is actually the first reference GeForce card that I've encountered that does have coil winds, 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 exhibit this noise. Exhibit it. 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 30 FPS, which is considered sort of the minimum of playable, was very unplayable, felt very laggy, whereas this 32 FPS actually felt significantly better. So yeah, that puts the GTX 680 as far as the 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 2 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 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 card for a second, stop and look at this card for a second, 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 while I'm 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 spike to 320 once, but then, you know, otherwise hover more around the, 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. 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 100% 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 benchmark's done. You can tell because the FRAPS counter 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 Afterburner is correctly... Look at that. It is monitoring core clock. Whoops. Oh no, I don't think it's monitoring that correctly. 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 69090, and the 7970. So it looks like all of the King performers...flickering... had the same issue with this game, so there you have it. So that's the 680, 590, 580, 570, 6990, 7970, and 7950. 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 reach its maximum TDP, or maybe there's some driver optimizations that 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, the 6990, the 7970, and the 7950, 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 going to 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 7970 and the 7950, 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 rows. So in review, there's the cards and Battlefield 3, including the power and temperatures of all of these games. And we can go ahead and hide those ones. There's Crisis 2, including power, temperature, min-max, and average numbers. The Witcher 2. So there's our power attempts, 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 3. Batman Arkham City, which was a Radeon-dominated test this time around. Well, other than the 590, but whatever, guys. All right, 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 in a single-card configuration at 1080p with high slash ultimate or ultra graphics 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.