Pros: Enormous amounts of parallel power, and a very strong core.q
Cons: Its default memory should have been reconsidered, as most of the latest games tend to like lots of vRAM
When I first laid my hands on this card I was thoroughly impressed because I was upgrading from 2x 9800GTX+'s and I was mostly used to the small body factor of them. This card is considerably larger than the counterparts mentioned but not to the point of being 6990 levels of huge. This card should fit 99% of standart ATX motherboard cases.
As my available vRAM tripled, I could now finally turn on some anti-aliasing on lots of games, some exceptions being Crysis and Battlefield 3 which crushed the vRAM to its 99.9% Nevertheless on the other 97% of the games available the card performed exceptionally. I was running Crysis 1 maxed out with 8xQAA at an average of 48fps, which was insanely awesome at that point since I was used to the artificial mid level shading and next to none anti-aliasing to be able to get 50+fps on my 9800's. Those 48fps's where very, very playable.
When overclocking the card I was able to raise the clock speed from a default 797MHz superclocked level speeds up to 875MHz without having to bump voltages. Obviously every GPU is binned differently but I've seen a lot of people which are getting respectable amounts of overclocking out of these versions. If I had a watercooling setup I would most definetely shoot for 900+MHz speeds which would be insane but need higher amounts of cooling.
The card runs considerably cool. When running at the lowest level of graphics performance you can easily see the card sitting at ~35C at idle on 80F room temperatures. I have set up custom fan profiles on Afterburner and the card does not exceed 67C when gaming. This is at 85% fan speeds which is what I consider the most tolerable level of noise coming from the fan. Anything besides that sounds like an overvolted hair drying blower.
When hit hard the card consumes a LOT of power. I've seen my card pulling 300+ watts when running 3DMark and Furmark (when set up to not throttle itself down).
Given the price point these days (which at the time of writing this review the GTX680 is brand new and the fastest single GPU consumer card in the world) this card is raising its price/performance ration very quickly. If you don't have the money for a 680, this is definitelya good alternative provided you're not interested in anything from the red team.
As my available vRAM tripled, I could now finally turn on some anti-aliasing on lots of games, some exceptions being Crysis and Battlefield 3 which crushed the vRAM to its 99.9% Nevertheless on the other 97% of the games available the card performed exceptionally. I was running Crysis 1 maxed out with 8xQAA at an average of 48fps, which was insanely awesome at that point since I was used to the artificial mid level shading and next to none anti-aliasing to be able to get 50+fps on my 9800's. Those 48fps's where very, very playable.
When overclocking the card I was able to raise the clock speed from a default 797MHz superclocked level speeds up to 875MHz without having to bump voltages. Obviously every GPU is binned differently but I've seen a lot of people which are getting respectable amounts of overclocking out of these versions. If I had a watercooling setup I would most definetely shoot for 900+MHz speeds which would be insane but need higher amounts of cooling.
The card runs considerably cool. When running at the lowest level of graphics performance you can easily see the card sitting at ~35C at idle on 80F room temperatures. I have set up custom fan profiles on Afterburner and the card does not exceed 67C when gaming. This is at 85% fan speeds which is what I consider the most tolerable level of noise coming from the fan. Anything besides that sounds like an overvolted hair drying blower.
When hit hard the card consumes a LOT of power. I've seen my card pulling 300+ watts when running 3DMark and Furmark (when set up to not throttle itself down).
Given the price point these days (which at the time of writing this review the GTX680 is brand new and the fastest single GPU consumer card in the world) this card is raising its price/performance ration very quickly. If you don't have the money for a 680, this is definitelya good alternative provided you're not interested in anything from the red team.
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