The MSI Twin Frozr II GTX 580 is pretty tempting at $389 with free shipping. I could get some of that cost back by selling this perfectly working GTX 560Ti.
Waiting for price changes, (will wait a month or so atleast) 680 looks like my new GPU. I am very impressed with this review and didn't expect that much adventage from Nvidia.
I'm still blown away by this card. It's probably a 50% increase in performance over my current card and likely a 70% increase after a good overclock; which is the same margin or increase from my gtx280 to my gtx480. So regardless of whether it's the top card it's worth it's asking price on that basis alone. The fact that it's 10c cooler, a few dB quiter, and uses 80watts less power is all gravy. Witcher 2, Crysis 2, Dragon Age 2 with a 60 frame min and my card not sounding like a ceiling fan *swoon*
oh woooow it smokes the competition, finally Nvidia delivered a "perfect balanced" quality product in performance, wattage and temps. im so getting this in 1-2 months unless they got something ever better coming Lets not forget that the Nvidia Drivers are still in beta, the party is gona be even better when the drivers mature in a month from now :banana: +2 to 10% maybe
hmmmm they look good, but I dont know if I should bite the bullet and get me one, my 5850's xfire are holding up for now. decisions decisions.
True that both cards are so close that AMD doesn't necessarily have to reduce prices, and if they do, it doesn't have to be by much, and while that isn't good for us, i would understand it if they didn't. Not sure why clock speeds are all of a sudden important to people, the 680 has an extra 81mhz and it's unfair, but i don't remember people saying we should overclock the GTX580 by 100mhz so that the 6970 didn't have an unfair advantage.
It's not unfair at all. This is the way the card ship 680 is better. By a good margin at 1080p. By a small margin at higher resolution. It's equal with triple monitors display (probably because of the memory). The 7970 beats it in the few games favoring Amd. Every reviews said that. What is unfair is calling this card mid range while it's priced at 500$ and we don't even know when a better card will ship by nVidia. People talk about august but it's just speculation right now. Could be september or october or june. This new awesome card that will destroy everything could ship 3-4 or 6 months before next update by Amd. So if the "wait for kepler it's just 3 months away" was good for nVidia then it must ge good for Amd too if the rumored high end card at dunno which price gonna ship next fall (if mid range is at 500$ i don't want to know how the high end gonna be). Right now the 680 and 7970 are both high end products at high end price. Everything else is just useless speculation. And Amd needs to drop the price. The price of the 7950 and 7970 are ridiculous. Amd wanted to cash in but it's now over nVidia kepler is there so let the price war and free games war and mir rebate war begin plz
I never said it was unfair, my point was that when when AMD had a lower clock speed, no one said a thing, so not sure why it's so important now lol. No one official is calling this a mid-range card, it's all assumptions, but while in the short run it would be fantastic for consumers if this was priced mid-range, the damage it could of done to AMD may of made it worse for us all in the long run, so maybe this is for the best.
Yeah good point. The price of the card is right no doubt about it. I would just like to see a less expensive 7950 so i'm gonna wait for a likely 670. Price will probably go down later this year and my oced 6950 does the job right now.
I like AMD, always have and used nothing but their CPU's and GPU's for years. I just switched as Intel got much better when it came to pricing, and Nvidia marketed features i wanted, and AMD didn't. I'm on the look out for something like a 670 as well, i have never grabbed the top GPU, and have no plan to, so if Nvidia can release something inbetween just under the 7970 for less money and with similar OC headroom, then that is all i need for the next year.
Yeah, never said i didn't prefer them, i make no secret of that, but purely for the Nvidia exclusive stuff, i used to only use ATI or AMD gear, but when the majority of games were TWIMTBP or had PhysX, and i rarely saw a AMD Gaming Evolved game it annoyed the hell out of me. Didn't helpt that Nvidia were promoting things like 3D which i like, and AMD were promoting multi-monitor which i don't. Even now, it's TXAA and adaptive v-sync, or even things like the Cuvid video decoer that keep me worried about switching sides. Just because Nvidia appeals to me more, doesn't mean i hate AMD, and it annoys me to see all these gloating post/threads that always seem to appear around the time of a new GPU.
wow a midrange?? what will they call the high end? great review! i'm very impressed by this and can't wait to see price cuts
They're going for $649 in AUS. But I only saw 1 store with them even listed so it's no wonder. Given that the GTX580 still goes for as high as $649 aus this gives me great hope that the price will drop fast and I'll be able to snag one for $600 at tax time.
Well, i hope that i wont see a review of a GTX660 saying "nVidia tolds us that this was going to be the new ION 3 for netbooks but since AMD did so bad, they released it as the GTX660!" or some none sense like that lol Anyway, very nice review and very nice card! Its consumption its like my GTX 560 Ti and its pulls almost twice the numbers in each bench. I do wonder why it performs (relatively) badly on Metro 2033 and why Anno 1404 performs so well on AMD cards... (as in precisely why it is like that, what kind of driver optimizations or shader coding is twisting the numbers so much not the usual "Cuz AMD paid'em bro!1!!" )
awesome.. but the dynamic clocks are a bit tricky. in some games it may work at 1100mhz clock ,but most of us would think, wooooooo that peformance at 1006mhz!! but, of course it is way better buy than 7970HD for singledisplay users. and the best part of it is its power consumption.