ASUS GTX680-2GD5 Pro Reviews

After testing two GeForce GTX 680 cards in SLI one day after the official launch, with the first public driver I'm quite impressed. We see good SLI scaling in all our games, except for Skyrim which seems to use a quirky rendering engine that doesn't play well with multi-GPU setups. Of course you'll only see decent scaling at high resolutions, 2560x1600 in this case. Everything below that feels like an insult for this two GPU monster setup. However, I can imagine users of 3D Vision with 120 Hz will see some nice improvements at lower resolutions like 1920x1200. AMD's latest HD 7000 Series introduced ZeroCore power which essentially turns off slave cards in CrossFire, so they consume no power until they are woken up for 3D gaming. This has a significant effect, as it saves around 15 W per card while being productive or surfing the web. Unfortunately NVIDIA does not have any similar technology at this time. So in idle, we see an extra 14 W of power consumed compared to a similar AMD setup. Not a huge amount, but it will add up over time. During 3D gaming, the GTX 680 setup is quite conservative with power and should run fine with a 750 W power supply. Previous generations required a 1000 W PSU to provide less performance. NVIDIA improved their display output logic with Kepler, so you no longer need two cards for a three monitor setup - a single card will do. Not directly relevant to this review, but I think it's an important change. However, if you plan on triple monitor full HD gaming at maximum setting, two GTX 680 cards will provide a much more enjoyable experience than a single card. Earlier today I finally ordered three 1080p monitors to add multi-monitor gaming performance numbers to our reviews. Pricewise $1000 is certainly not cheap, but given the current options on the market it seems like the best choice - if you really can spend a lot of money on graphics cards. The dual-GPU cards GTX 590 and HD 6990 are no longer relevant as they are a much worse buy, price-performance wise.