OK, so I know they're essentially the same card but the 770 has bells and whistles, which I like. Is there any point getting a new 770 over a used 680? I'll be upgrading from my 570 soon so I would appreciate any input. I have previously owned a 670 and would like to go a bit higher this time, given how cheap the cards are now. Share your thoughts people.
The 770 is marginally quicker both at stock and overclocked, it can snap at the heels of a stock 780 in most games. However, if the price difference was substantial (maybe £50+) I'd still go for the used 680. Of course the warranty on a new card is nice, but pick up a used EVGA 680 and I suspect some of the warranty will remain. The 770 is quite noticeably quicker than the 670 at 1080p in my experience. I went from the 670 F.T.W. to the 770 Superclocked (via a 560Ti 448 ).
Yeah that's the thing - price difference is significant and as always the performance margin just doesn't justify it. I was surprised to see a 770 on ebay for £209 because that's mighty cheap, but I'm even more surprised to see how little some 680s are going for - £125?!
Aye it's quite a disparity. I suppose the perception is that 680s might have a lot of hours on them, whereas a 770 is likely to have been caned far less?
The only major difference between the two is the 700 series has updated boost system, which also allows for better OC. Since this is simply firmware it's possible to update the 600 series vbios to use this feature which would make them literally identical. Go with the 680 and flash it.
It theorectically allows for better overclocking (technically it allows for a more consistant & higher boost clock), but in reality most GK104's top out around the same mark - 1250-1300 depending on make & model. The main advantage to the 770 is the higher rated memory. Whereas most 680's would top out around 7-7.2Ghz on the memory the 770 should hit closer to 7.6-8Ghz (based on reviews in general). Balanced off against the price disparity though the 770 seems pointless at ~ £60 more than a 680 used.
My thoughts too, especially as there are EVGA 680s going which still have 1-2 years warranty in them. Cool beans Also, I have to add that the idea of "boost clocks" and what not is totally new territory for me. Even when I had the 670 I never looked into overclocking it; I just ran it at stock and it ripped through everything in its path, almost double what my good old 480 could churn out. Looks like I have some research to do...
You can bios flash 680s to do the same boost thing as the 770s do and id never pay the difference myself.
So I got my 680 yesterday and I'm really happy with it. Signature cooler but stock clocks. I made a bit of a goof with my PSU though - I'm currently on holiday (with my PC, ofc) and forgot to take the 8-pin PCI-E cable with me, so for the moment the 680 is running with two 6-pin connectors... and it seems to be totally fine, even when overclocked. Can't imagine that the extra two pins, both ground, really do much for the card, but I'm open to suggestion on that one. It runs fine at 1150 core, but crashed at 1200 after about 3 minutes of Heaven 4.0, about 60C under load. I suspect I haven't set the power target high enough, and I'm not going to be shooting for the stars until I get back home and hook up the proper 8-pin connector.
You could just flash it with a 770 BIOS. (choose the correct one, I hasten to add) Minimal bump in the stock GPU clock, hefty bump in the memory clock - both of which are entirely achievable on a standard 680. However, the 770 BIOS gives you GPU Boost 2, which is driven by temperature headroom rather than the power limitation on the 600 series GPU Boost. My stock 680 wouldn't boost beyond 1228MHz, regardless of whether it was watercooled or not. Boost 2.0 makes a healthy difference - with enhanced cooling, be it water or fancy third party HSF, it raised the ceiling for the boost clock - the gpu can now boost beyond 1300MHz.
If you want more than a 670 a 680 isn't going to do you much good. The reason that I have a 670 was the difference in price didn't justify the small increase in fps going to a 680. Granted that was around release time so things may have changed.
Thanks for the info Spreadie - I'm reluctant to flash just yet because I'd be pretty happy with 1200 boost on the GPU and that will probably be achievable with more tinkering (and the proper power connectors). But the new version of boost does sound very enticing. And yeah, the price difference has changed a lot; in fact, 670s can sell for more than 680s. It's crazy, but that's the nature of the second hand market, and ebay in particular. I decided just to bite the bullet on an EVGA card for £150 all in and I'm happy with that - massive upgrade from my 570, and I probably won't upgrade for at least another year.
Looks like I spoke too soon - the card gave up during a run of Heaven at stock clocks and I had to reboot. So I've ordered an 8-pin adapter which I'll hopefully get tomorrow.
I would say, before attempting to flash it with a 770 Bios check that the RAM is happy to run at 7Ghz. Theoretically the 680 should be fine at 7Ghz as most overclock that far but it would be best to try before hand to make sure (one of my original 680's only hit 6.8Ghz for example).
Haven't tried OCing the vram much yet as I've been concentrating on the core. But I like your way of thinking... if I can get a good memory OC to accompany the boost OC I'll be happy and I probably won't bother with the BIOS flash. Truth be told, even at factory boost of 1086MHz the card is an absolute beast. Interestingly, having the 8-pin connector made no difference at all to stability - this card simply will not play ball at 1200MHz boost clock even when the temp doesn't go above 60C and the power slider is maxed at 130%. So I guess I'll leave the boost for now and push the memory a little bit. So much for all the "extra power phases for more OCing headroom" spiel from EVGA - at the end of the day, either the card has good silicon or it doesn't! I have to do a hard reset every time Heaven crashes... there's no recovery at all, but at least when the OCing is done, it's done. Edit: well that was easy. I tried +200 on the memory clock and it crashed early in the Heaven benchmark. LOL! Looks like I'll be running it at SC clocks then, which is fair enough.
Memory you can easily do +500 on most of the cards out there. Gpu clock is a lot more tricky and you will be lucky to get it to +170 stable.
Yep I see that many people are getting big memory clocks close to 7GHz, however there are a few like me who struggle to get past 6200MHz. I tried +155 on the memory earlier and I got the same crash, but if I'm being honest I'm happy with +100 which works just fine. I also think that there could be some driver issues or issues with Heaven 4.0 but at least I know there isn't a problem with the card as it runs Firestrike and 3DMark11 effortlessly.
Overclocking the memory gave me the biggest boost with my old 670, got up to nearly 7GHz. Some programs including Vram stress testers will run fine with much higher than 7GHz but games like Metro: Last Light will show artefacts. I had to notch it down a little more after seeing the grenade aiming arch go all over the place in Crysis 3.
