Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 Windforce 5X Super Overclock 2GB GDDR5 - Quintuple Cooling

Test Setup & Card Comparison

Test Setup

As usual, the following are the specs of our trusty graphics card test bed system:-

• Intel Core i7-975 (3.33GHz)
• Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard
• 3 x 1GB DDR3-1333 G.Skill memory in triple channel mode
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

We have included NVIDIA's dual-GPU GeForce GTX 690 due to a comment made to us at Computex 2012 that the Gigabyte Super OC GTX 680 would be able to compete with and, on certain benchmarks, even beat the GTX 690. Obviously, we were skeptical that any single GPU card could compete with a dual-GPU one, but perhaps Gigabyte has something special up their sleeve? We'll find out in the next few pages.

The list of cards tested and the drivers used:

• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 Windforce 5X Super OC 2GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 301.10)
• MSI GeForce GTX 680 Twin Frozr III OC 2GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 301.10)
• Palit GeForce GTX 680 Jetstream OC 2GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 301.10)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 300.99)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 4GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 301.33)
• AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 12.3)

The list of benchmarks used:

• Futuremark 3DMark 11
• Unigine Heaven v2.1
• Far Cry 2
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2
• Crysis Warhead
• Crysis 2
• Batman: Arkham City
• Dirt 3

For easy reference, here's a comparison of all the custom GeForce GTX 680 cards tested, as well as the NVIDIA reference card.