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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Oxford Guy - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - link
"The 680 is cooler and quieter and higher performing all at the same time than anything we've seen in a long time..."Gee whiz. I wonder why 28nm is more efficient than 40nm.
jmsabatini - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
You really needed to test Skyrim with a TON of ultra high res texture mods.Without that, your results were right in line with my expectations, i.e. not worth the extra $$$ over the vanilla card.
CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - link
Something the regular joe moronic masses cannot seem to comprehend for the life of them, is when the cores peter out before the ram can be effectively used while maintaining a playable framerate, no amount of memory no matter how much "can help".Let me put it another way:
The card makers need a more powerful core to use more than 2GB memory.(actually less than 2, but I won't go into that)
The results are all over the web, and have been for months. No one should still be so utterly blind to the disclosed facts, still.
hammbone852 - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
This is disappointing but i'm guessing the drivers aren't pushing the GPU to Its fill potential. This card should be in the top 3 in all tests.Pey - Friday, September 21, 2012 - link
As a SLI user, I will buy two of these and I´ll tell you why.I tried 2 MSI 680 Lightning are the temps go up to 75-76 each card, while 2 680 reference cards reach 72°. So you guys forget that for sli users, you have to get cards with a blower -unless you have watercooling.
I know the price is not ideal, but for people like who are looking for a couple 680 with overclock and a proper watercooler-free solution, this is the card to go.
You could go for a MSI Lightning, but when you put in another card, temps will go up to 15-20° on each card, and i dont like playing while having 76-78° plus the noise.