GTX 680 4GB SLI or GTX 670 4gb Tri SLI?

[BringerOdeath]

I got a hold of 2 more 30" monitors for dirt cheap and 3xgtx 480's isn't cutting it @7680x1600 on the games I play.....Would either one of these setups work? I could do triple gtx 680 4gb, but I will have to sell a kidney...:P. Anyone have an benchmarks on this res?

[koc]

since the GTX 670 almost the same performance of GTX 680, the gtx670 would be the best choice, but for 3x 30", i believe you need 4 way GTX 670 sli.

[BringerOdeath]

Wow, that's going to be spendy. Might as well go with 4 gtx 680 4gb since I can get them for about $550 and the 670 4gb is about $480. I have seen some benches that 3 cards can do it if you enable the pci-e 3.0 on my x79(sorry haven't updated my system specs here). 4 cards and waterblock is going to hurt me a bit....:P

[Ket]

GTX670 or 680... doesn't really matter. At that resolution a SLi setup of either 670s or 680s will have their work cut out for them. As the performance between the two cards isn't earth shattering I would probably get some 670s, OC them for stock GTX680 and a bit performance, and pocket the savings.

[BringerOdeath]

Do you think 3xgtx 670 4gb with the pci-e hack would be powerful enough to run bf3@7680x1600 with AA off on ultra?

[Chickenfeed]

I'd look over these results here,

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...nd,3162-5.html

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5805/n...-ultra-fast/11

Take in mind this only reflective of single player performance. As I'm sure you know by now multiplayer can be a lot more demanding.
Also you are talking of pushing over 12MP vs shy of 7MP. Thats significantly more so all that said I have my doubts that even 3 680s would run that setup at a respectable clip on Ultra in BF3. Perhaps you can check on various forums and you might get lucky enough to find someone crazy enough to already have tried that kind of setup

[Ket]

Do you think 3xgtx 670 4gb with the pci-e hack would be powerful enough to run bf3@7680x1600 with AA off on ultra?

I doubt it. Probably high settings, but the same can be said of the 680s in that scenario. If you really want to run crazy high settings like that really you are looking at 2 or 3 GTX690s.

[Nizzen]

i doubt it. Probably high settings, but the same can be said of the 680s in that scenario. If you really want to run crazy high settings like that really you are looking at 2 or 3 gtx690s.

lol :d

[Andrea deluxe]

3 x 670 4gb

[[XC] Oj101]

Most GTX 670 reviews were done with newer drivers than the GTX 680 reviews, newer drivers which offered more performance. I've played with both and the GTX 670 at 1,200 MHz comes close but can't quite touch a stock GTX 680. I'd say the performance difference is pretty decent. As you add more cards, scaling also becomes less and less efficient, so based on these two points I'd rather go for three GTX 680s than four GTX 670s.

[UrbanSmooth]

At that resolution, four GTX 680 4GBs or bust. Also, get yourself a board that will do full x16 PCI-e 3.0.

Anything less would be uncivilized.

[koc]

This words from my friend who have 3x 30" HP monitor,

With three GTX670 4GBs + (Asus R4E X79), he can not max the settings of all the games, and when he add one more GTX670 he get many errors while gaming, also he suffer from the bandwidth limit. and HE is thinking now to buy a full x16 PCI-e 3.0 z77 board.

[BringerOdeath]

Well Z77 boards don't have quad or triple SLI I believe. They only have SLI. I saw a lot of people that removed the bandwith limit by turning the pci-e 3.0 on with the patch (I think the guys name is callsignvega) which fixed the bandwith on the cards on 8x slots. LOL, the only board I have seen with 4 16x full speed slots is that SRX.....

[Boulard83]

670 4gb 3way. Cant need more power, it can run surround at that res with lots of candy.

[UrbanSmooth]

670 4gb 3way. Cant need more power, it can run surround at that res with lots of candy.

BUT I NEED MOAR POWA, CAP'N!! SHE'S FADIN' FAST!!!!i!!

[BringerOdeath]

I am leaning towards 3x zotac GTX670 4gb and play at 5760x1200 on BF3. I should be able to max out on that res, but I do think that I can play that with my current setup though......maybe I should wait to see ATI 8 series or GK110....

Urban since you have a similar setup to what I used to have, did you ever have an issue with scaling on triple sli? I always get an issue with usage dropping into the 30's on all 3 cards and then back to the 90's randomnly which causes stutter. Everything is new in my setup except for the vid cards and it is still doing this. Tried a different psu also, same issue. If I set any combination of the 3 cards in dual sli they work fine with scaling in 90's all the time.....Could one of the cards be bad?

[Utnorris]

I know Vega switched to the Gigabyte Sniper Z77 and is using 4 x HD7970's for his 5 panel 2560x1440p setup (not sure what the res comes out too), so maybe you might want to ask him to see what he thinks. I believe he tried GTX680's originally, but I am not sure.

[BringerOdeath]

I thought vega was doing pci-e 3.0 fine on x79 with 4 gtx 680's. Isn't the z77 kind of a downgrade? Four 7970's work at pci-e 3.0 on x79, so why would he change?

[UrbanSmooth]

Ask him: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...r-edition-2012

[Utnorris]

Because his MSI took a big dump and the Gigabyte has 4 x PCIe 3.0 x8 slots, which is more than enough for current cards.

[UrbanSmooth]

Because his MSI took a big dump and the Gigabyte has 4 x PCIe 3.0 x8 slots, which is more than enough for current cards.

Though, not enough for UrbanSmooth.

[Vicey]

If I can play BF3 at 7680x1600 with two GTX 480's on Medium with acceptable FPS then I think two GTX 680's with 4GB of memory would handle it on High/Ultra.

The main issue I have with the game is the 1.5GB of graphics memory. I'm confident if I didn't have that issue I'd be able to play the game on high because I can play it fully maxed out with everything on Ultra at 2560x1600 and still get above 30 FPS with my 480's - I know 7680x1600 is a lot more but it's not that much more taxing on the rendering. It's just the memory usage which is so much higher.

In other games for example: Team Fortress 2 (Yes an old title, but hear me out!) I get about 450FPS with the FPS limiter turned off with a single display (2560x1600) everything maxed out. Then if I bump that to 7680x1600 in surround mode I get over 300 FPS still. The memory usage is about 1.35GB though. I think it's the memory that makes the most difference because if you can't fit everything in to the frame buffer you're going to have a serious bottleneck as the game struggles to fit different things in to memory and that is when BF3 messes up for me when I increase texture sizes and other things like that which increase the memory use.

So my advice: Get either the Two GTX 680's or Three GTX 670's - Don't get three or four GTX 680's like some of the above advice you've received because with what I see attempting to play BF3 on my system such hardware isn't necessary and I think you'll get more than acceptable performance with just two GTX 680's.

[CrazyNutz]

You right. Three 680's, or 670's will have enough compute power to get the job done. However it is the vram that is the issue in this game. Will 4gb be enough to run that res on ultra?
I can't say with 100% certainty but I think it may. Therefore i would do 3x 670's 4gb.

[BringerOdeath]

So I broke down and got 3x zotac gtx 670 4gb cards. They use the gtx 680 pcb and I can use GTX 680 waterblocks on them! . I got them for $440 each which wasn't too bad! After selling my gtx 480's with waterblocks it will put me out just under $1k for cards and waterblocks... I just hope I can actually get good scaling with the 670's, because for some reason I could never get scaling on my 3 gtx 480s above 40% on all 3 cards when running triple sli. If i just had 2 cards in SLI I got scaling in the %90 range, no matter which combination of the 3 cards I used. So it wasn't a bad card or anything and it behaved the same on x58 and x79.....

[Gunnz Akimbo]

Yep, 3 690's is the only solution.

If you have a spare counterfeiting machine, you could go 4 690's. get some octasli action