Graphics Cards - Page 257

Team Green stamped down their whoop ass foot a few weeks ago when they launched their GEFORCE GTX 680, and now AMD are returning the favor by not only dropping prices on the HD 7000 series cards, but offering three free games for any purchase of the HD 79xx cards.

The name of this promotion is called "Three for Free", because, well, that's what it is. If you purchase a HD 7950 or 7970, you'll receive Dirt Showdown (when it drops in May), Nexuiz (again, in May) as well as Deus Ex: Human Revolution (as well as the Missing Link DLC pack), which hits in May too. If this is not enough, the offer lasts up until April 30th, and you have up until May 31st to download the respective keys to the games listed above.

On top of this, there are price drops on the 7000 series, with the HD 7970 dropping from $549 to $479, the HD 7950 drops from $449 to $399. On the mid-to-low-end range, we see the HD 7770 dropping $20 to $139. You have two weeks to act on this, so if you want to grab some Team Red hardware, some free games, and a new bunch of pricing, hit it up as soon as possible!

Palit have already launched their GEFORCE GTX 680 JetStream, but did you really think they'd go back to their man cave and continue gaming on their high-end GPUs and not work on anything else? Ha!

Now we have the new JetStream which sports 4GB of RAM. The new GTX 680 JetStream 4GB joins the 4GB ranks being made up by Gainward and their Phantom 4GB as well as Galaxy's GTX 680 4GB. This new extra RAM definitely comes in handy for those insane resolution and anti-aliasing that you can use, as well as the triple-monitor Surround Vision setups.

The new GEFORCE GTX 680 JetStream standard model with 2GB comes with core speeds of 1150MHz and 6.30GHz on the memory. The 4GB variant sticks to the NVIDIA reference clocks of 1056MHz and 6.00GHz for the core and memory, respectively. It will still use the 6-pin plus 8-pin PCIe connectors. The card itself looks quite sexy with three fans, too.

We previously posted regarding how it was unlikely that AMD would be implimenting any price drops on its HD 7000 series GPUs for a couple of reasons. Now KitGuru is reporting that they got a call from an insider and is claiming that AMD is preparing price drops from the 7970 down to the 7770.

The 7970 is AMD's current flagship card. At top overclocks it can compete toe-to-toe with the GTX 680. It currently, however, is priced around $50 more than the competitor. It is set to drop in price by up to $60. The 7950 is set to drop around $55 which will move it into a price zone that is a fair bit less than the GTX680. Nvidia still has nothing for that price spot.

The drops are supposed to continue all the way down the to 7770 which is set to receive a drop of around $15. Obviously, none of this is set in stone and could change over the next couple of weeks before these occur. Prices on the shelves could take a bit of time after the price drops for board partners.

More leaks from the all too common source of Chinese channels confirms that Nvidia has a dual-GPU GTX 690 in the works. This leak also gives some more detail on the specifications of the yet unannounced card. This card will likely be released shortly after AMD tries to steal the thunder back from Nvidia's GTX 680 with their HD 7990.

The upcoming card will be based on the GK104 silicon and require the juice of two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The card will utilize a PCI-E 3.0-compliant bridge chip to link the two cards together. Its display output configuration will comprise three DVI and one DisplayPort. Obviously power consumption is a common concern, but for the people laying down cash for a chip like this, it shouldn't be too ridiculous.

Nvidia is supposidly setting the PSU requirement at 650 watt+ which seems oddly low for such a beast (assumed) of a card. It sounds like the chips may be slightly down-clocked in order to reach this TDP and keep temperatures under control. It can be expected that all of the features of the 680 will be in the 690. More as it comes.

The wonderful GPU that is Kepler keeps on giving to Nvidia. This chip really was make or break for the company and they came through will an incredible graphics card that has really put the squeeze on Team Red. AMD has not been forced to drop prices as of yet due to the fact that Nvidia hasn't been able to pressure the lower market yet.

But that's all about to change. Nvidia is preparing to recycle the chips that couldn't make it as GTX 680s by turning them into the GTX 670 and 670 Ti. The GK104 that will be in the 670s will have one fewer SMX, bringing the total CUDA cores down to 1344. This should put it in the range of the 7950 and the former 580. The specs are as follows:

The new cards undercut the Radeon HD 7950 by $50-100, placing the product around $349-399. You should expect the announcement around Computex Taipei in May 2012.

SAPPHIRE is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to their Toxic-branded video cards, and it looks as though the SAPPHIRE HD 7970 Toxic is going to be no different, and maybe even step it up a bit when it comes to smashing the ball out of the park. The card comes with a resolution-busting 6GB of memory in 24 GDDR5 memory chips, 12 on each side.

In order to power the factory-overclocked "Tahiti" GPU from AMD, and 24 GDDR5 7 GT/s memory that takes some seriously strong VRM. Sapphire decided to implement an 8+3 phase power supply, which uses solid-state chokes, that don't whine under stress, as well as International Rectifier DirectFETs. The FRM draws power from two 8-pin PCIe connectors. Sapphire went a step further by implementing LEDs for each of the 8 vGPU phases, which gives a real-time indication of their individual loading. These LEDs can be seen through a window on top of the card, as pictured below.

The cooler is built from a large aluminum fin heatsink which draws heat from teh GPU and memory chips on the obverse side of the PCB. The FETs on the obverse side are cooled by additional heatsinks. From here, we have the memory chips on the reverse side of the PCB cooled by a metal back-plate. The heatsink makes use of four 8mm-thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes, as well as a vapor-chamber plate. This is ventilated by two 80mm fans.

With the release of the kick-ass GTX 680 at a competitive price point, many thought, including me, that the HD 7970 would undergo a price cut to be more competitive. Let's be realistic: the GTX 680 beats the HD 7970 in almost every single benchmark, including being more efficient, at a lower price point. It's pretty hard to justify charging $50 more for a worse card.

Or is it? Again, let's be realistic. The GTX 680 can hardly be purchased anywhere and when it is in stock, it's bought out in a matter of hours. This was something the HD 7970 had trouble with as well up until a few weeks before the 680 launch. Then it suddenly got plenty of stock. So while the 680 can hardly be purchased anywhere, the HD 7970 has the luxury of being widely available.

So, there's a few conclusions that can be drawn from this. First, AMD thought Nvidia would continue their practice of pricing higher performing cards at a premium. Second, it could be that AMD can't afford to drop the price on the 7970. The silicon is a pretty complex chip, and as such is expensive.

Time for another rumor, so go ahead, get the salt out and throw some over your shoulder, and for good measure, find some wood and knock on it. Now that we're done with that, let's move onto the goods. We have what we believe to be the specifications for the Kepler based GK106. This chip should end up being a direct competitor to the HD 7950, HD 7870, GTX 560 Ti, GTX 560 Ti 448 and GTX 560.

The specifications are said to be as follows:

The card is expected to land in Q3 of 2012 which is still a fair distance off but could be just in time for the summer upgrade season. If it performs anywhere like the GTX 680, we should have another good card on our hands. It will be interesting to see if they price it at a competitive price like they did with the GTX 680.

According to 'Gibbo' on the Overclockers.co.uk forums, we should expect the new NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 670Ti and GEFORCE GTX 670 to launch late-April, or early-May. These two GPUs will be placed into price segments aimed at AMD's Radeon range of GPUs.

The GTX 670Ti will replace NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580, and take on the HD 7950 3GB. The GTX 670 on the other hand, replaces the GTX 570 and should be slightly faster, too. The GTX 560Ti and 560 are not expected to be replaced with 600-series GPUs until much later into 2012.

The low-end 520/550 cards will reportedly be rebranded into the 600-series, where we should expect the usual same card, re-boxed as 600-series GPUs. Gibbo also mentions the dual-GPU NVIDIA beast, which we should expect to arrive as the GEFORCE GTX 690, and "can be released when NVIDIA desire to do so". The roadmap that Gibbo is coming from says that the GTX 680 is the fastest single-GPU card, but a faster single-GPU card is expected later this year.

It looks like we're not quite done with news about the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680. As our review showed, the card is pretty amazing and is still efficient while being amazing. Pictures have surfaced of a Galaxy-brand GTX 680 which is cooled by a single-slot cooler. This is made possible by the amazing efficiency of the new Kepler architecture.

195w TDP is pretty high to be handled by a single-slot cooler, so frequencies should be expected to be reference or below. This device certainly will be nice for smaller, mid-tower PCs or for a cramped PC in which you want to run SLI. No release date or specifications have been released. For all we know, this could be a prototype that never sees the market.

Earlier on today we met up with the folks from Palit and Gainward at their Taipei headquarters to discuss all things NVIDIA and GeForce since they now (finally) have a new GPU model to pimp and sell, that of course being the GeForce GTX 680.

During our meeting someone (we never actually got introduced) walked into our meeting and dropped off a second video card, besides the first Palit one we were looking about - but that Palit model needs to stay quiet a little longer yet, we may have already said too much.

Anyway, back on topic - what the man dropped off was a Gainward GTX 680 Phantom video card. On first inspection I asked if it was passively cooled, quickly realizing that would be near on impossible due to the fact that the GTX 680 is a high-end GPU part and generates a lot of heat. On closer inspection we saw that the Phantom actually includes two cooling fans built inside or at least just below the massive radiator / heatpipe design which covers the full top surface of the video card.

Kepler truly was a make-or-break launch for NVIDIA. With their competiton, AMD, squeezing out a full top to bottom line up before NVIDIA could even manage one launch, they had to have something wonderful and able to compete with AMD's offerings. Enter Kepler. This card has been roughly four years in the making. Rumors have been flying rampant regarding its projected performance.

Finally, launch day arrived (today). We were the first to publish a comprehensive review of the new card, and what a card it is. It's faster and more efficient than AMD's top card, the 7970, and it even overclocks better, at least with extreme cooling solutions. The launch was a little bit messy, what, with us not getting a card and stuff, but overall, NVIDIA had a successful launch of the GTX 680. So much of a great launch, that the CEO sent out an email company wide. You can see the email below the line.

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We've had quite the eventful pre-launch news nuggets for the upcoming 28nm Kepler-named GEFORCE GTX 680 GPUs, but this is a totally new step in a very good direction: Newegg are the latest to jump the gun and offer the new GEFORCE GTX 680 GPU's for sale.

The cards are on sale for anywhere between $499.99 and $534.99, they have ASUS, GALAXY, ZOTAC, EVGA, GIGABYTE, PNY, and MSI cards listed. Availability is of course going to sink like hell on this as this news starts spreading, as everyone will be flocking to Newegg to hit up some of that Kepler lovin'. Get in quick, and remember to send me three of them, ok? The interesting thing I found is, when I've searched for them - they're gone. So it looks like Newegg have pulled them from the site - so I would keep your eyes peeled on this one, folks! They should pop up any second/hour/day now!

To throw in some extra awesome sauce on this news, we also have vice president of NVIDIA, Ujesh Desai presenting the GEFORCE GTX 680, in the video below:

Today has been a video card news pot of gold. First we had the GTX 680 pictures, then the GTX 680 review, then the HD 7990 specifications, and now this. Swedish proverclocker Elmor managed this feat with a MSI R7970 Lightning card, which is a non-reference variant on the AMD HD 7970. So, for all of those people out there that thought MSI was making too big of a deal of its product design, maybe its time to think again. After all, look at what this card was capable of doing!

That picture isn't photoshopped. What you can see there is a MSI 7970 running with an 1800 MHz Core clock and with a 7.70 GHz Memory clock. It required 1.7v and liquid nitrogen to achieve. The massive clocks yielded a memory bandwidth of almost 370GB/s and a 3DMark 11 performance score of P15035. The rest of the test-bed consisted of an Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition six-core chip clocked at 5207 MHz, with 4 GB (4x 1 GB) DDR3 memory clocked at 2314 MHz, and MSI Big Bang XPower II motherboard. Maybe AMD or its board partners can manage clocking it up to compete with the GTX 680.

UPDATE - our own TweakTown full review of the NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 680 is online right here.

Today has been a busy day regarding the upcoming nVidia GTX 680. A review of the card has been published on Tom's Hardware (since removed), even though the card hasn't even been launched. The card officially launches this Thursday, March 22nd. Take a look at its performance! Generally, it beats out the 7970, and comes close to the dual-chip cards of the previous generation, ie the GTX 590 and the 6990.

Additionally, the card had an overall lower draw the 7970, yet it still managed to beat it. It appears that nVidia has a winner here with Kepler. It even manages to beat the dual-chip cards in a few benchmarks! I can't wait to see the flagship version of Kepler, which has yet to be talked about. I think most gamers should be happy with the 680, however, since it is such a great card. But enough of my blab, I'm sure you would like to see the results!

That's right, you read the title right. We have in our digital possession 3 pictures of a yet unreleased retail Gigabyte GTX 680 graphics card. It would appear that Gigabyte has followed nVidia's reference board design for this card, opting to use the stock cooler. The only thing that is a visible change is the futuristic sci-fi art on the cooler shroud.

Earlier today we reported on another store listing the GTX 680 for sale. I commented on how, with all of these store postings, that the release of the GTX 680 must be coming soon. These pictures confirm just that. We have proof of a retail packaged GTX 680 meaning these are probably on the way to retail stores now. The first images of a retail GTX 680 have appeared online thanks to Overclock.net forum member "ironman86." They show that the card does in fact use two 6-pin power connectors. The source has promised us benchmarks, and we will try to get them posted as soon as he does. In the meantime, take a look at the rest of the pictures.

It seems like everyone is jumping the gun trying to sell a card that doesn't even technically exist yet. Yes, I know it will exist at some point, but until it's released, it doesn't exist as far as I am concerned. The latest posting comes in the form of two cards being listed for sale at $578.20 on NCIX.com. One card is by eVGA and one is by MSI.

With all of these slip ups, we have to be getting close to release date. We just have to be! The new postings don't really give us any sort of extra information that we don't already know, other than a possible selling price and what speed MSI's factory overclocked card is going to be running at. In case you're curious, that speed happens to be 1056Mhz. The MSI listing is here, and the eVGA listing is here.

A post over on Overclock3D.net has a surprise for ya'll. It's a picture of GIGABYTE's GEFORCE GTX 680 GPU, and while I'm excited to see what NVIDIA's latest Kepler 28nm-based GPU can do, the GIGABYTE card seems very reference. In a world where AMD allowed non-reference designs on their top-end GPUs, it's a bit saddening to see this.

The first picture is of the box, where it features the GIGABYTE robotic eye which looks cool, I always associate it with Transformers for some reason. We see that it sports 2048MB of GDDR5 RAM, and includes a 3-year warranty on the card, again, great work by GIGABYTE. We also see that it's based on PCI-Express 3.0 and includes support for DirectX 11, which is something that should be standard, and known by now.

The next picture is of the card itself, where we can see the usual reference build, sporting just one fan. The new cards are on the aforementioned 28nm process, so we should expect these GPUs to run cooler than the 500-series, and significantly cooler than the 400-series from NVIDIA.

Forget buying your GTX680 overseas, it's now available for order in the US priced only at $566.75. While we don't learn anything new from the product page, it almost certainly confirms that it's coming, and it's coming soon. The site is taking orders, so if you're interested in running SLI, now might be the best time to pick up 2 or even 3. That is, if your pocketbook can handle it.

You can view the product page here and check it out or even order some, as the orders are being taken "regardless of availability." If you do decide to purchase one, do you mind grabbing one for me?

As we near the release date of the nVidia GTX 680, more and more charts are surfacing with purported performance, specifications, and the like. Today is no exception. There appears to be 6 new benchmarks run on the card, using an extreme-cooled Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor (running at stock frequency), ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard, 8 GB (4x 2 GB) GeIL EVO 2 DDR3-2200 MHz quad-channel memory, Corsair AX1200W PSU, and Windows 7 x64.

Benchmarks included 3DMark 11 (performance preset), Battlefield 3, Batman: Arkham City, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Lost Planet 2, and Unigine Heaven (version not mentioned, could be 1). All tests were run at a constant resolution of 1920x1080, with 8x MSAA on some tests (mentioned in the graphs).

If the following graphs are true, it appears Kepler is a winner. As previously reported, the 640M is pretty awesome, which helps make these graphs a bit more believable. Additionally, these tests were not run by nVidia or a board partner. Instead, they were run by a reviewer from HKEPC. It will be interesting to see the final benchmarks after the NDA is pulled and reviews go live. I'll be watching to see if these are on-point when the actual reviews start rolling out. So without further ado, I present to you the charts: