NVIDIA GTX 680 Reviewed: A New Hope

System Setup
In our system we will be running three different GPUs. The NVIDIA GTX 680, the AMD HD 7970 and the NVIDIA GTX 590. We will be running the majority of our benchmarks with these three cards included occasionally omitting the GTX 590 and occasionally adding other cards when the benchmarks allow us to.

Our system setup is as follows:
CPU - Intel Core i7 3960X ES
Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-X79-UD7 (with PCI-Express 3.0)
RAM - 16GB Quad Channel Kingston HyperX 1600Mhz
Storage - SSD - Patriot Pyro 120GB - HDD - Velociraptor 600GB
Power Supply - Thermaltake Toughpower XT Gold 1475w
GPUs - NVIDIA GTX 680 - NVIDIA GTX 590 - AMD HD 7970

Drivers
GTX 680 - 300.99
GTX 590 - 296.10
HD 7970 - 12.2



Benchmark Setup
We will be running the following benchmarks: SiSoft Sandra 2012, Futuremark 3DMark 11, Unigine Heaven 3.0 and Cyberlink MediaEspresso. We will also be benchmarking the following games: Battlefield 3, Batman Arkham City, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, DiRT 3, Metro 2033 and Skyrim. In our testing, all of the games will be running at absolutely maximum settings while running at our monitor's native resolution of 1920x1080. This means that we will be cranking up every single game to its maximum potential keeping in mind that things like CSAA and FXAA will not be part of our graphs as they are NVIDIA exclusive technologies and do not fairly compare against AMD's running MSAA. As such, all of our testing will be with MSAA and set to the maximum settings that the game enables.