Nvidea GTX 680 2GB cards out today

[M31 0]

Nvidea GTX 680 2GB cards are out today apparently, the bigger hardware sites in in the UK like Scan and OcUK will be selling them from about 1 PM and prices are expected to be about £410 -£420, all reference designs just different warranty's from different manufacturers to set them apart, SC versions will be out in about 2 months and 4GB ones much much later and much more expensive, then there is the rumoured GTX 780 out at end of this year early next year to think about too.

Finally we can do three monitors from one Nvidea card with the GTX 680 but even 2GB vram might not be enough for 3 x 1920 x 1200 (or 1080) LCD's ? This is where the future 4GB vram card would be ideal.

Early indications are its a great card though, runs cool with the drop in die size and overclocks well if you want to, also does outperform slightly the latest ATI 7970 in most areas.

I'm tempted, maybe not to much of a jump over my current GTX 570 SC, but it might get me going for trying triple screen again?

For sure, for single screen use its not going to give much performance gain over even something like a GTX 285 for FSX if FSX is all you play, FSX is really CPU bound, but I play a lot of other stuff too.

We'll see.

[britfrog 180]

i cannot justify this kind of money for such a small increase in performance from my gainward gtx460 2gb which by the way powers 3 monitors from the one card. i will wait for a year and buy one for a third of the price when i do my next update.

[M31 0]

It is hard to justify but I'm seriously thinking about it ... at the end of the day I'm a keen PC hardware enthusiast too, depends just how much they are. I know Nvidea have asked the US stores to keep the price at $499 presumably to undercut the current ATI top of the range card, but that price even with adding VAT in the UK should be about £377 I read ... but I know from past experience with day one release cards that it will be a good bit more ... UK price gouging strikes again.

Are you using your GTX 460 with triple head to go for three monitors? for sure the GTX 570 SC I have cant do three LCD's unless you run two in SLI surround vision ... actually intended to go triple screen with 2 x GTX 570's for a while but sold one here.

We'll know exactly how much the 680 will be in about an hour and a half I guess.

[M31 0]

I went and ordered an EVGA GTX 680 at about 1:15 PM this afternoon from OcUK and they have just emailed to say they are out of stock, these ones sold very fast apparently, changed my order to a Gigabyte one (they are all the same) for £10 more (sigh) and it would normally be here tomorrow but the last year or so all orders from OcUK and Scan seem to take 2 days to my area so I'll have it on Monday

I should have probably waited a while to save a few quid, but I had the money spare just now and that's me sorted ... well at least until Ivy Bridge is out

Here's a review from Nexus for anyone interested, they are giving one away if you feel lucky!

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/36509-nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-2gb-graphics-card/

[britfrog 180]

It is hard to justify but I'm seriously thinking about it ... at the end of the day I'm a keen PC hardware enthusiast too, depends just how much they are. I know Nvidea have asked the US stores

Are you using your GTX 460 with triple head to go for three monitors? for sure the GTX 570 SC I have cant do three LCD's unless you run two in SLI surround vision ... actually intended to go triple screen with 2 x GTX 570's for a while but sold one here.

We'll know exactly how much the 680 will be in about an hour and a half I guess.

i am running them as 3 separate LED monitors as they all have slightly different resolutions so cant sli them

[britfrog 180]

I went and ordered an EVGA GTX 680 at about 1:15 PM this afternoon from OcUK and they have just emailed to say they are out of stock, these ones sold very fast apparently, changed my order to a Gigabyte one (they are all the same) for £10 more (sigh) and it would normally be here tomorrow but the last year or so all orders from OcUK and Scan seem to take 2 days to my area so I'll have it on Monday

I should have probably waited a while to save a few quid, but I had the money spare just now and that's me sorted ... well at least until Ivy Bridge is out

Here's a review from Nexus for anyone interested, they are giving one away if you feel lucky!

http://hexus.net/tec...-graphics-card/

the reckless hussy you what you doing with the old cards?

[M31 0]

Heh, not sure yet? I sold one of the GTX 570's here already, will wait until the new card arrives and make sure its not a dud, then sell either the current ( in rig in my sig) 570 here or move it into my other i7 920 rig and sell its ATI HD 6970 2GB here,and if no sale here after a while onto ebay.

[britfrog 180]

just been reading some of the tests on the 680, seems it is really something , no doubt ati will release something better in a few months, only to be leapfrogged again. i wonder what the end result will be in real life terms on fsx you must keep us informed of whether you see an enormous difference or whether the cpu is still the log jam.

[M31 0]

Yup, been reading some very positive reviews and first hand user experiences on the card since its release and that's just as well because this was a very impulsive buy even for me, its been a long time since I bought new hardware on the day of its release.

Been reading that it can handle triple screens of 1920 x 1200 each just fine with its 2GB vram, that's a resolution of 5760 x 1200 !! my current LCD is a 28" 1920 x 1200 LCD and I now do plan to go ahead and get two more before the summer for triple screen, the GTX 680 will actually do 4 screens from the one card and I have a VR Insight GPS that is in effect an LCD monitor, so hopefully it will all work fine.

I've not read any reports of anyone using it with FSX yet, but I don't expect any performance increase with this sim, I'll be happy if it doesn't break anything with FSX and I can still use Nvidea Inspector the way I did before, but for sure I will see good gains in other software I own

Looking forward to Monday when the card arrives and I'll report back on it after trying it in FSX.

[mutley 4,487]

You got us excited too! I will be interested to see what performance gain you get.

I've got a GTX 580 and it is pretty good but the native multi-screen idea is growing on me

[M31 0]

Card arrived late Monday afternoon (even with a packet of sweets thrown in from OcuK!) and I've been giving it a fair old test the past couple of days, absolutely love it, so silent too that you think the fans not working but it does, it also runs slightly cooler than my GTX 570 SC does.

No problems in FSX, cant say there is a performance gain here? but when I checked my FSX setting again I found they had been notched down a bit from my original ones, sometimes scenery add-ons do this, so set them up high again as per the Nick Needham guide, re checked Nvidea Inspector settings and maybe its a placebo effect but FSX looks amazing, smooth as butter.

Have tested with IL2 Cliffs of Dover, Rise of Flight, DCS-A10, Skyrim (with high textures all maxed out at 1920 x 1200) and amazing performance, cant wait to get two more LCD's of same type for triple screen that this card can apparently handle just fine.

Its actually slightly shorter than my GTX 570 and presumably the GTX 580 too and I know it draws less power due to the GPU's 28nm process, its also a PCI-e 3.0 card but obviously works fine in my current boards PCI-e 2.0 slots, but I'll be ready when I upgrade to Ivy Bridge later this year whose motherboard will have PCI-e 3.0 slots. I did feel a bit guilty waiting for the card to arrive because its pretty expensive (I was £450 inc delivery and VAT) but its here now and I'll sell off this 570 soon to get some cash back in the bank, but no regrets with the card whatsoever now, awesome performer

Some pics.

And finally in the case, really need to give the case interior a good dust out and tidy up the wiring again since I had 2 x 570's in SLI in there.

[mutley 4,487]

Wow, that's a nice piece of kit, another year or two until I upgrade but it's exciting to see the latest card

[britfrog 180]

i was reading an interesting study on the asus tech site (i am a beta tester for asus) and they reckon that the lions share of the performance gain is from the increased memory the graph they showed is quite interesting although the gpu shows an improvement in speed they have compared ot with a 480 card with 6mb memory and the results are very close, they are now considering the commercial potential of selling older gpu's with uprated memory as this is a much cheaper way of offering performance to the financially challenged, however there are contractual probs with nvidea if they do this.time will tell.