Nvidia Kepler - Geforce GTX680 Thread - Now with reviews

I just got an email from EVGA saying that they had some, but 9 minutes later it seems they're gone.

My 680 is quieter than my Gigabyte 580 was, somehow. Of course it runs hotter (around 80C while playing BF3), but it's definitely noticeably quieter. In BF3 it's dipped below 60 fps a few times at 1920x1080, but it seems to average around 70-75.
 
Thinking about cancelling my Galaxy GTX 680 order from Amazon. Hasn't shipped yet. If anyone wants it and wants to arrange to take over the order, hit me up.
 
I'm ordering another 4gb of RAM. I think 4gb is starting to be too little and 8gb is dirt cheap these days. 24gb is just nuts though lol.

I finally was able to successfully order one from newegg today after a whole week of failing to catch one. Hopefully it gets here on Monday.
 
Just a question. When are the non-reference cards going to go on sale? Any time frame from manufacturers? I'll probably snag one in the next few months to replace my GTX460.
 
24gb of RAM?

Are you photo editing while you are 3D modeling while you are video editing while you are powering a Tardis while playing Crysis?

What's up with the RAM police? Heh. It's like $250 to get 32GB of RAM. You can run scratch drives for super fast access..VMs...all kinds of uses. Don't hate!
 
To any Gaf folks, if you are interested I have 2 580 Evga 3gb Classifieds that I am selling. I know prices have dropped, but I am willing to sell to anyone from Gaf at $350.00 each plus shipping. They still carry the lifetime warranty as well.

I have them up on Ebay at the moment, but I would rather sell to someone here versus ebay.
 
To any Gaf folks, if you are interested I have 2 580 Evga 3gb Classifieds that I am selling. I know prices have dropped, but I am willing to sell to anyone from Gaf at $350.00 each plus shipping. They still carry the lifetime warranty as well.

I have them up on Ebay at the moment, but I would rather sell to someone here versus ebay.
I am so tempted.
Hard to bite for me with 670 coming, but anyone looking for the excellent advantages the Classified offer will be very pleased with them for sure.
 
Just a question. When are the non-reference cards going to go on sale? Any time frame from manufacturers? I'll probably snag one in the next few months to replace my GTX460.

Galaxy / KFA2 4GB Hall of Fame cards are being released next month, the only non-reference card I'm sure of.
 
I know there are third party waterblocks available for these GTX680 cards but does anyone know if there will be some third party air coolers?

I know like for the GTX590 they never made them only just waterblocks.
 
http://www.arctic.ac/en/p/detail/index/sArticle/554/sCategory/2182 but it doesn't work on reference cards ( Derp ), only on non-reference where the power connectors aren't stacked.

Haven't heard of any ( yet ) that fits on reference cards.

The hilarious thing is that they do show GTX680 temperatures with that cooler, but there are no cards available with non-stacked connectors... so whichever partner of theirs (KFA?) supplied them with the prototype boards to design the cooler on, didn't know about Nvidia's intention of using stacked connectors obviously :p which doesn't matter for the partner company because they can create their own cards , but now Arctic is fucked because none of their top end models fit the damn reference cards lol

But they do have this smaller cooler which is compatible

http://www.arctic.ac/en/p/cooling/vga/375/accelero-twin-turbo-ii.html?c=2182

and seems to perform OK (nothing about VRM cooling though ...)

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,8...Turbo-2-Thermalright-Shaman/Grafikkarte/Test/

also I just got a 120 hz / 3D Vision 2 monitor and now my heavily clocked GTX480 suddenly feels inadequate :p I said earlier I was going to wait for the GK110 or whatever the big chip is called, but if I can sell the 480 to a friend I'll jump ship to the 680 ASAP (as the 480 will have lost all value by the end of the year once the lower end Kepler chips show up :p). Now to find a friend with a case + PSU that fits the damn card lol
 
What's up with the RAM police? Heh. It's like $250 to get 32GB of RAM. You can run scratch drives for super fast access..VMs...all kinds of uses. Don't hate!
Yeah, I'm kind of feeling the limit of my 12 GB. As soon as I run a VM for compiling (so at least ~6GB) there just isn't much left!

When I buy a new system I want to go at least 32 GB.
 
When more then a handful of developers care about utilizing such hardware, maybe. Very few devs have the following to recoup the cost of such a graphically intense game released on such a finicky platform.

Hm. I wonder if that'll begin to happen if the PS4/720 have 4GB of RAM. Thanks for your response.

Yeah, I'm kind of feeling the limit of my 12 GB. As soon as I run a VM for compiling (so at least ~6GB) there just isn't much left!

When I buy a new system I want to go at least 32 GB.
Wow. I can hardly justify 16GB (I only rarely hit 8GB when multi-tasking while doing some high resolution Photoshopping).
 
Wow. I can hardly justify 16GB (I only rarely hit 8GB when multi-tasking while doing some high resolution Photoshopping).

16GB of RAM is only ~ $100. Sure, you could go for less, but with RAM being that cheap, why would you? Even if you don't put it to use now, you may very well in the future.
 
16GB of RAM is only ~ $100. Sure, you could go for less, but with RAM being that cheap, why would you? Even if you don't put it to use now, you may very well in the future.

Yep and history has shown that old format ram prices go up when a new format comes out because the 2 or 3 plants that produce most of the memory switch over to the new format. So a year or 2 from now it will most likely be more expensive to buy that extra 8gb of DDR3 1600 ram in the future when you do need it as opposed to now.
 
Yep and history has shown that old format ram prices go up when a new format comes out because the 2 or 3 plants that produce most of the memory switch over to the new format. So a year or 2 from now it will most likely be more expensive to buy that extra 8gb of DDR3 1600 ram in the future when you do need it as opposed to now.

I was thinking about mentioning that. This is very true. My PC only has 4GB of RAM DDR2-800. Amazingly, it cost me about $100 then too. Getting another 4 is more costly now than it was when I built the PC in late 2008. In fact, since I bought 4 sticks of 1GB each, filling my mobo's slots, I'd have to buy 4x2GB, which makes it an even more expensive proposition.

I plan on building an Ivy Bridge machine this summer. I'm going for 16GB of DDR3-1600. That's a 4x increase, the biggest increase from PC to PC I've ever had. All for the same cost.

In fact, I've always spent about $100 on RAM on my machines. It's just that the increase got more and more with each build.
 
16GB of RAM is only ~ $100. Sure, you could go for less, but with RAM being that cheap, why would you? Even if you don't put it to use now, you may very well in the future.

Yup, I plan on upgrading eventually, if only for the increased OS cache once prices lower a bit more. I was waiting for *GB 1600MHz SODIMM sticks to come out.
 
With real 680's in the wild now, this is probably of less interest to most; but does anyone have a feel if 'high end' (GK110/112 - may have got that wrong as I got confused with all the internal part codes flying around) Kepler parts are still coming later in the year?
 
I just got an email from EVGA saying that they had some, but 9 minutes later it seems they're gone.

My 680 is quieter than my Gigabyte 580 was, somehow. Of course it runs hotter (around 80C while playing BF3), but it's definitely noticeably quieter. In BF3 it's dipped below 60 fps a few times at 1920x1080, but it seems to average around 70-75.

Set up a custom fan profile. Running Unigine for over an hour straight, stressing my cards on average to about 97% and I never went higher that 64c. I have a custom fan profile that sets the fan speed to the match the temp. These cards are also very quiet compared to my 580's and I can barely hear them over the case fans.
 
With real 680's in the wild now, this is probably of less interest to most; but does anyone have a feel if 'high end' (GK110/112 - may have got that wrong as I got confused with all the internal part codes flying around) Kepler parts are still coming later in the year?

Rumors suggest that there is a GK110 on the horizon and that is going to be the big bad boy of GPU's. From what many have said, it seems Nvidia branded the current card as the 680 when they realized that the top AMD card was beaten...so they called it the 680 and technically it is the fastest GPU on the market today..but looking at the road maps, the 110 is going to be the top dog when it releases.

Some argue that they are paying high end prices for a mid-range card, but if the card is currently the best out there, it really is the top end card..for now at least. While who knows when they will release the 110...some have said September time frame, others say not till next year.
 
Rumors suggest that there is a GK110 on the horizon and that is going to be the big bad boy of GPU's. From what many have said, it seems Nvidia branded the current card as the 680 when they realized that the top AMD card was beaten...so they called it the 680 and technically it is the fastest GPU on the market today..but looking at the road maps, the 110 is going to be the top dog when it releases.

Some argue that they are paying high end prices for a mid-range card, but if the card is currently the best out there, it really is the top end card..for now at least. While who knows when they will release the 110...some have said September time frame, others say not till next year.

Aha, thanks. All the 'September / end of year' talk for a possible uber-card had gone quiet for me (possibly not monitoring the right sites) since the actual 680 release. I am still hoping they've not canned it.
 
Set up a custom fan profile. Running Unigine for over an hour straight, stressing my cards on average to about 97% and I never went higher that 64c. I have a custom fan profile that sets the fan speed to the match the temp. These cards are also very quiet compared to my 580's and I can barely hear them over the case fans.

I'll do that, thanks. I installed EVGA Precision X but I didn't mess around with anything, I was too excited to test BF3.
 
Aha, thanks. All the 'September / end of year' talk for a possible uber-card had gone quiet for me (possibly not monitoring the right sites) since the actual 680 release. I am still hoping they've not canned it.
The chip itself can't be canned because it's the next NV chip for the HPC market (Teslas and supers). GK104 can't compete there because it is a gaming GPU with gimped compute capabilities. The big unknown right now is will NV feel enough pressure from AMD to release GeForces on GK110. For that AMD must make a single GPU card that GK104 won't be able to beat.
 
The chip itself can't be canned because it's the next NV chip for the HPC market (Teslas and supers). GK104 can't compete there because it is a gaming GPU with gimped compute capabilities. The big unknown right now is will NV feel enough pressure from AMD to release GeForces on GK110. For that AMD must make a single GPU card that GK104 won't be able to beat.

Cheers for that. HPC cards are gimped in other ways that makes them dogs for gaming aren't they? I'm a bit hazy about this.

Be a shame if the beast never sees the light of day in a gaming card.
 
also I just got a 120 hz / 3D Vision 2 monitor and now my heavily clocked GTX480 suddenly feels inadequate :p I said earlier I was going to wait for the GK110 or whatever the big chip is called, but if I can sell the 480 to a friend I'll jump ship to the 680 ASAP (as the 480 will have lost all value by the end of the year once the lower end Kepler chips show up :p). Now to find a friend with a case + PSU that fits the damn card lol

Which monitor? BenQ? If so..impressions?
 
Rumors suggest that there is a GK110 on the horizon and that is going to be the big bad boy of GPU's. From what many have said, it seems Nvidia branded the current card as the 680 when they realized that the top AMD card was beaten...so they called it the 680 and technically it is the fastest GPU on the market today..but looking at the road maps, the 110 is going to be the top dog when it releases.

Some argue that they are paying high end prices for a mid-range card, but if the card is currently the best out there, it really is the top end card..for now at least. While who knows when they will release the 110...some have said September time frame, others say not till next year.

is that the one that's going to be 50% faster than amd? :)

I'll probably wait for non-reference cards or just wait it out this cycle. I really don't need a new gpu. Unless something crazy comes out in the next 6 months.
 
How easy is it to use EVGA's step up program? Is it dependent on having the item in stock in their online store?

I want to get a 680 and then step up to the 4GB model when it's out, since most seem to think it'll be out within the 3 month time frame....
 
I have only 6GB and can use 3d max and zbrush with more than 15 milion poly models. I really don't know what are you doing with 24!:o

I think the cheap RAM fad has taken on a waft of the torrent fad back in the day, "But it's for downloading linux distros!!" we all know it isn't true :P Some people just don't want to admit they like big numbers.
 
How easy is it to use EVGA's step up program? Is it dependent on having the item in stock in their online store?

I want to get a 680 and then step up to the 4GB model when it's out, since most seem to think it'll be out within the 3 month time frame....
Just call and see if they can do a raincheck or something.
 
is that the one that's going to be 50% faster than amd? :)

I'll probably wait for non-reference cards or just wait it out this cycle. I really don't need a new gpu. Unless something crazy comes out in the next 6 months.

Something I saw on overclock.net claimed 50% faster than the current 680. Dunno about all of that, but it's bound to be a beast.

At work so can't get the link
 
How easy is it to use EVGA's step up program? Is it dependent on having the item in stock in their online store?

I want to get a 680 and then step up to the 4GB model when it's out, since most seem to think it'll be out within the 3 month time frame....

I'm pretty sure that you won't be able to do that with Step-Up. According to their Terms and Conditions:

EVGA said:
  • Step-Up is limited to pre-approved graphics cards only and can only be used for exchange to a different and higher performing GPU.

Graphics Cards Examples:

GTX 460 → GTX 580: YES (Upgraded GPU)
GTX 460 768MB → GTX 460 1GB: NO (Same GPU)
GTX 570 → GTX 480: NO (Must be GPU upgrade)

Otherwise, I'd do the same thing :(
 
Something you should call about.

Might be glad to take in some extra 680 inventory and pawn off some 4GB cards since there's a much larger price gap between 460 versions and 680s.
 
How easy is it to use EVGA's step up program? Is it dependent on having the item in stock in their online store?

I want to get a 680 and then step up to the 4GB model when it's out, since most seem to think it'll be out within the 3 month time frame....

You can usually only step up to reference design cards. For example, several people are going from Classy's to 680's reference. Since the 4gb versions will not be reference, they typically are not included in Step up.

But the way it works if it were an option is that you submit for Step Up from your "my profile" page where you select one of your registred items. You then go into a que...once you are in the que you are good to go.

I was able to step up a 480 to a 580 and only had to pay shipping...I was in a que for a 2 weeks, but was worth it. But like I said, they normally only allow step up's to reference cards.
 
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