EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified Review: Pushing GTX 680 To Its Peak
by Ryan Smith on July 20, 2012 12:00 PM ESTOC: Gaming Performance
Having taken a look at how well we were able to overclock the GTX 680 Classified and what the power, temperature, and noise impact of that overclock was, it’s finally time to take a look at what it does for gaming performance. As always we’ve culled our results a bit to focus on games that need the extra performance and avoid games that are likely to be CPU limited (and hence waste the overclock).
Thanks in large part to our memory overclock the GTX 680 Classified finally picks up some Steam in Crysis. At 36fps for overclocking without overvolting it’s just enough to tie the Radeon HD 7970, which shows just how far behind the 7970 the GTX 680 is. The higher overclocks afforded by overvolting improve performance a bit more, but with such a small improvement in memory clocks we see an equally small improvement in Crysis performance.
Metro responds well to our combination of core overclocking and memory overclocking, which leads to the stock voltage overclocked GTX 680 Classified picking up 9% and pushing it ahead of the 7970GE to 43fps. Overvolting and further overclocking adds just one more frame per second however.
Shogun 2 ends up being our most interesting result, but not necessarily for the right reasons. As we alluded to earlier, overvolting will send power consumption shooting towards the GTX 680 Classified’s power target, which is exactly what has happened here. The overclock without overvolting sees a respectable performance increase, but additional voltage sends performance back down to the point where it’s not much better than the stock GTX 680 Classified. Overall our core clock was typically under 1100Mhz here when overvolted.
Shogun 2 appears to be an outlier among all of the games we test, but it’s a stark reminder that there’s more to overclocking than just adding power and cranking up the core clock.
Where the stock GTX 680 Classified didn’t greatly improve on the reference GTX 680, overclocking has changed things significantly. 73fps represents a 12% performance improvement for the stock voltage overclocked GTX 680 Classified, while overvolting gets us to 75fps.
Finally with BF3 we see another solid gain from overclocking, with the non-overvolted GTX 680 Classified improving over the stock card by 9% to 76.5fps. Overvolting gets a further 2.6fps (3%) to 79.1fps.
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Belard - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
This card is so old-school looking... like an Atari 2600... or 70s camera.ekon - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
Few people are aware that EVGA was in the compact camera business back in the 70s:http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=65bac5&s=6
Belard - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
Wow, Amazing!Its so cool how a 1970s camera's lens look just like a blower! What were the chances!
:)
Belard - Sunday, July 22, 2012 - link
Kinda funny. I showed my 7yr old the big picture of this EVGA GTX 680 classified card and he said "it looked really old"... wow.For the retro- look, it does look nice. There will come a time when the computer toys we have today will look like OLD OLD junk.
If mankind makes it another 100 years, our PCs, tablets and GPUs would be like telegraph equipment.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
That's an amazing comment considering the years long AMD standard block look on 99% plus AMD cards we've been treated to.I remember being sick to my stomache seeing the same old red red red red red pcb on them all. Finally one amd fan promoter claimed he had a blue pcb amd card and linked a pic but it has the same old sad red square cover with the black lines.
I do realize when the amd double D breast design recently hit many fanboys went into some sort of sexually perverse mental mode, but that shouldn't wipe out the endless years of amd standard fare we were all tortured with.
In the case of this card, there's a lot of white on the outside I haven't seen anywhere else, the white "top" with printing will be staring at you out of the case, something so many cards have been oblivious too for far too long... then we also have the black carbon look - another unusual feature although with the fanboysim over anything and everything black that is understandable as I'm sure their pr boys figured that part a clear win, sadly enough.
Haravikk - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
With 4gb RAM it seems like it's almost intended to be the ultimate Second Life card; powerful enough to handle that app's mediocre but insanely demanding graphics with the RAM to hold all the hundreds of overly high-resolution textures plastered onto every visible surface.But for $660 I'm not sure it's worth the novelly =)
dave1_nyc - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
OK, I know that this is trivial, but the previous Classified at least looked kinda cool and unique. This one seems visually unappealing.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
But once you put it in the case, usually within a few minutes of having an insane "unboxing" session much like a religious pilgrimage with a possible absolutely boring youtube minutes somehow considered a "treat" by the disturbed (of which there are many), you shove it in the case and put on the side cover... never to really see it ever again in it's fully glory, until it's death.What you will see is the big fat WHITE laberl and red classified printing jamming at your face if you have a side window..... clearly the most important aspect - even though 98% don't have a window to look through... but if you do - you're set.
Don't mind me - I'm still amazed how "the feel" of some look makes it or breaks it for 99% of the retarded humans that surround me - especially when "the looking" is done like .000001% of the time as in the case of these video cards.
It must have to do with their estrogen levels I tell myself, or maybe they don't have a girlfriend and that's why...
MrSpadge - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
> Software overvoltage control is forbidden.I can understand this for the reference design. But for custom designs? WTF?!
shin0bi272 - Sunday, July 22, 2012 - link
The instant I saw the original 680 I said that the 256bit memory bus was going to limit it severely. Even before I saw any other stats for the thing I knew id never buy one. Nvidia was cheap when they released the 680 because they saw what the 7970 was putting out and they said we'll call our 660 midrange our 680 high end and we can make more money (also love the fact that you guys test the handful of games that amd's 7 series beats the nvidia 6 series... not cherry picking your benchmarks at all nooo).This card does push the 680 to its limit which is cool and all but it just proves that a) the 256bit mem bus is still a midrange card designator no matter how much they claim gddr5 is fast enough to not need more than that... it does. And b) Nvidia could have pushed the 680's base clock up much higher and, while it would still be bottle necked bad, it would have been more attractive.
Bring on the 700 series Im done with the 6's