EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified Review: Pushing GTX 680 To Its Peak
by Ryan Smith on July 20, 2012 12:00 PM ESTPortal 2, Battlefield 3, Starcraft II, Skyrim, Civilization V, & Compute
Moving on to the back-half of our benchmarks, these are the games that the Kepler architecture traditionally excels at. Hopefully this means we’ll get to see the GTX 680 Classified spread its wings a bit more here.
Given how much of an emphasis SSAA puts on GPU performance it comes as no great surprise that the GTX 680 Classified does fairly well here, picking up an additional 9-10% compared to the reference GTX 680. At 52.4fps it’s just shy of what would be needed to smoothly play Portal 2 at 5670x1200 with SSAA.
Meanwhile its gains in BF3 are tempered somewhat, only picking up 7% at 2560. Though this is still enough to push it past 70fps. 1920 resolution gamers looking for a 120fps experience will also see some improvement, but it’s still not enough to average 120fps on a single card.
Oddly our SC2 framerates are almost flat. SC2 is most often CPU bound so that does come into play to some degree, but we would have expected a bit of a gain at 2560 given the 4% gain at 1920.
However the typically CPU-bound Skyrim actuals eeks out a small 3% performance improvement at 2560. Still, even a reference GTX 680 is overkill for Skyrim without 3rd part modifications.
Finally, Civilization V sees some performance improvements, but again it’s less than the full force of the factory GPU overclock. 6% at 2560 will be all that the GTX 680 Classified can do.
Moving on to compute quickly, since most compute tasks are GPU-bound the factory overclock does help to some degree. The Radeon HD 7970GE is still more than a potent adversary though.
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ubernator44 - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
edit, sorry 17 phases :P 14+3 phases :Psan1s - Friday, July 20, 2012 - link
This isn't really intended for ordinary gamers, but rather overclockers using exotic cooling. In that case, the overclocking features this card provides makes it a far more valuable card to them in comparison to reference cards.RussianSensation - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
Ya, but in that case the MSI Lightning 680 imo is the better card. It has more premium components and is also ready for LN2.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, July 29, 2012 - link
And has a 375 W ceiling..... right....Sabresiberian - Sunday, July 22, 2012 - link
As far as cooling solution, that's just your opinion, (actually from what I've read it's wrong because the Lightning gets warmer) and a lot of people aren't going to like MSI's because they want the warm air moved out of the case.The big kicker for me though is the 4GB of memory; if you plan on running 3x 2560x1440, 2GB just isn't enough. I'm an MSI fan, but I can't use their product to fill my needs. If I want 4GB and "unlocked voltage" my only choice is the EVGA Classified.
Amoro - Friday, July 20, 2012 - link
I wonder why the SC version is the only one with overclocked memory. Does that mean that overclocking the memory isn't valuable? Typo maybe?ltcommanderdata - Friday, July 20, 2012 - link
Probably because stable memory overclocking is difficult to achieve when you are trying to drive double the VRAM. Seeing 4GB of VRAM seems to be overkill, keeping 2GB of VRAM and increasing memory clocks would probably have been more worthwhile although it doesn't quite have the same marketing ring to it as "4GB".CeriseCogburn - Sunday, July 29, 2012 - link
I wondered where all the blabbering amd fanboys skittered off to in their constant 3GB ram drone psychosis....Let me just share a quote : " Quote :
The 4GB -- Realistically there was not one game that we tested that could benefit from the two extra GB's of graphics memory. Even at 2560x1600 (which is a massive 4 Mpixels resolution) there was just no measurable difference. "
LOL
So now the blabbering jerks will yapper about cost, complain about the 7970 6GB being "superior" and have the most enormous and gigantic brain fart concerning their endlessly godless and irritatingly stupid 3GB ram superiority dance vs 2GB 680 670.
It's a freaking TOTAL BLACKOUT at alcoholic blood toxic death level.
Just wait, because no amount of evidence will do it for the amd fanboy, and their masters at amd have known this for years, and have been playing them like a retarded out of tune fiddle gets played. A week or a day on they will be back at it, on some other article , any webspot they land... and the brain fart will be what they are not even aware of.
It's clear how Hitler came to power.
mpschan - Friday, July 20, 2012 - link
Where are their mid-range offerings? Where are their $200-300 cards on this latest architecture?I'm starting to think that by the time we see a 660 AMD will be releasing their 8000 series.
superccs - Friday, July 20, 2012 - link
Yeah I totally clicked on this article thinking it was a 660 review. WTF? Nvida, you no like midrange anymore?Bork!