The GTX 680 Arrives! – Part Two, Maximum Overclocking vs. the HD 7970
Conclusion
This has been quite an enjoyable now four-week exploration for us in evaluating our new GTX 680 since Kepler Editor’s Day in San Francisco. We are totally impressed with the cool-running Kepler chip that has such outstanding overclockability for a good price. It slots right above the HD 7970 and it offers more advantages than just price.
We see good overclockability with quietness at stock voltage and fan profile from even the regularly-cooled reference design GTX 680 as well as from the PowerColor custom-cooled HD 7970. The GTX 680 is a better value overall than the HD 7970 if you are looking at performance and especially since the HD 7970 is still priced fifty dollars more than the GTX 680. From this evaluation, we see that the GTX 680 will not take a back seat to the HD 7970 in overclocking and we do not see this changing in the immediate future.
The competition is hot and AMD offers their own set of features including Eyefinity and HD3D with the competing Radeon HD 7970. However, we still expect that AMD will be forced to drop pricing on the reference and stock-clocked HD 7970s and we also expect that they will feature more overclocked and super-overclocked versions as their process continues to mature. Of course, Nvidia’s partners will do the same and we can expect more overclocked GTX 680s.
Stay tuned, there is a lot more coming from ABT. You can expect more great reviews from our Mobile Tech guys and you can expect a Genius product review also this week. And don’t forget to check our forums! Our tech discussions are outstanding.
Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
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Where are BF3 results?
No Battlefield 3 results. Although just about every other tech site includes it, we did not deliberately leave it out. Unfortunately, we have had issues with Origin since the last patch.
Hopefully we will have these issues solved pretty soon.
Thanks for the info.
Really useful as I’ve got a 2560×1440 monitor and was looking between the 680 and the 7970. As I intend to water cool and overclock. This information is great.
This has led me to get a second hand 7970 (about 25% cheaper than new).