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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plonk420 - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
i'm kinda more interested in 8xMSAA or 4xSSAA...Ryan Smith - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
Ahh, okay, I see what you mean.So the short answer is that the memory requirements on Ultra are so high that we wouldn't be able to test most of our previous-generation 1GB cards at 1920 if we used it. I did want to have Ultra in there somewhere so that was the compromise I had to make to balance that with the need for a useful test at 1920.
Though I will agree that it's unorthodox.
RussianSensation - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
At the same time that would be pretty useful to see if GTX570/580 run out of VRAM in Shogun with Ultra settings at 1080P. What if GTX660Ti only has 1.5GB of VRAM? We'd want to know if it's already starting to become a bare minimum in games :)CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
The 570 and 580 don't run out, but the 5750, 5870, and 6950 1gb and 6970 1gb do. A lot of amd fans have those 1gb cards because as usual, the amd fan is all about scrimping pennies and claiming they have the best anyway. Sad, isn't it.Sadder is the 1920x1200 rez they use here, which allows crap amd cards to lose by less when most people have 1920x1080 where nVidia stomps on amd ever harder, because as usual, amd fan boys are hacking away over pennies and buy the much cheaper and far more common 1920x1080 monitors instead of 1920x1200, saving $50 minimum amd more like $100+.
So, amd loses, all around, again, as usual.
Sabresiberian - Sunday, July 22, 2012 - link
There is no "1200p"Catch-phrases like "720p" and "1080p" refer to television formats; they aren't just the vertical pixel number. 1920x1200 is not a television standard, and the "p" is superfluous.
;)
LtGoonRush - Friday, July 20, 2012 - link
While EVGA's cooler is an improvement over stock, I wonder how a capable card like this would perform if paired with an high performance cooler like the Arctic Accelero Xtreme III. Kepler-based cards drop their boost clocks above 70C to compensate for increased leakage, so it would be interesting to see how fast this card could get while staying below that mark. Even at maximum RPMs the fans would probably be quieter than this one.pandemonium - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
I can't understand where the market for this card is. Wait, nevermind. I forgot how many nVidia fanbois there are out there...RussianSensation - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
So true. $740 GTX680 with a volt-mod kit vs. $450 HD7970 that overclocks on stock voltage to 1.175V and gives the same performance. NV marketing machine FTW!CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, July 24, 2012 - link
Amd cards never give the same performance as they lack so many features.you can perhaps, if you're lucky, get an fps only equivlanet in a few old games, or a hacked equivalent with crappy IQ that I'm sure you cannot see anyway, and in that case your power/performance is a big fat loser too - we cannot suddenly forget that for just this latest round when it was the most important point ever made for several years just prior now can we...
pffffft !~
ypsylon - Saturday, July 21, 2012 - link
Not with this card. When you buy reference for liquid cooling then you can't go wrong with EVGA. Best cards around. When you buy EVGA Hydrocopper - you can't go wrong. But EVGA Classified are usually only highly overpriced reference designs. Yes there are tweaks here and there, but for max performance [air cooler] out of GTX family most people [including my humble person] go to MSI TwinFrozr3 Lighting/EX.or Asus 3 slot bricks (name escapes me).Lately EVGA sliding with theirs top offerings. SR-X motherboard is cruel joke when compared to ASUS dual CPU creation and now this. Another misfire.
But I think EVGA doesn't care too much. They have devoted customers who buy everything EVGA without thinking...