$1,000??? are you freakin kidding me?

I never thought that gaming GPU's would get so expensive; but I guess that's why AMD/Nvidia release so many re-branded & re-badged cards; so they can fill up every price point and start charging more for their higher performance ones.

It sounds nice; but I don't think I'll ever be getting this

The price is not surprising since it is basically two $499 GTX680 GPUs on a single card and aimed for those that want to SLI on a single slot, previous dual GPU cards have had the double the single card price, I wonder if the dual GPU 7990 will be similar although 7970s seem to be dropping down into the <$450 range

Personally I'm waiting for the 685

I doubt the 685 sees the light of day.

Sorry did I miss some news?

GK110 is a Disaster.

After ~20 years, finally a card that's significantly more expensive than the Tseng ET 4000 (6000?) that was in my first gaming PC; not that there was a snowball's chance in hell of me buying it.

I am already surprised there are enough people buying the 680 to keep it in short supply. We live in a time when 95% of games are console ports and the current consoles are quickly approaching the end of their life cycle.

Unless you use texture mods for Crysis or GTA4, run triple monitor setups for current sims or BF3, or use a 3D display, you will never see a difference between a GPU for 200 bucks and one for 1000.

Hey I remember the ET 4000! I had one in my first PC.... With a whopping 1mb of video memory on an ISA bus!

Agreed, if you don't run high texture mods + high AA + high resolutions and/or multimonitor then you don't need the latests/greatest, I do and want the best graphics quality and 3 monitor on a single GPU so that is why I am waiting for the 685 and willing to spend $600 on it. My current $230 GTX 560 smokes everything I play at 1920x1080, but I want triple monitor 4xAA/16xAF goodness.

Then again people who are happy without the high texture/AA/resolution would probably be just as happy with a $200 console




Yeah I think it is dejavu with the problems they had with the 480/580, and if when the 685 finally comes out eventually if it turns out to be another stonkin performer like those were, for the patient ones like me then all will be fine.

my 7950 plows through everything in eyefinity with no problems.

As a previously frustrated 5870 Crossfire Eyefinity user, that is awesome to hear!

Hopefully the dawn of the new age of all games supporting Eyefinity/Surround mode natively is almost here now that the hardware has caught up and both companies support triple monitor on one card (finally NV got it's acto together), woohoo!


I miss using my 3rd monitor... currently trying to stay patient so I can compare GTX 685 to the HD8XXX.

My 5870 Eyefinity setup is running pretty good with my three 19" monitors. All that will change when I go 24" next September though...

Yeah I loved my single 5870 at 1920x1080 and it is/was a top performer for more years than I would have expected, the main problem was that the 1GB VRAM just eventually became not enough to handle the modern higher detail textures combined with 4xAA at triple monitor resolutions for me (5760x1080). It is/was an awesome card for the money for 2-3 years even after 2-3 generations of cards had come out and one my personal favorite GPUs I've owned.

Eventually I got a second 5870 to crossfire but the same 1GB VRAM limit was still there and many of the sims I play didn't benefit from crossfire so I had to upgrade.

That hit/miss support for SLI/Crossfire is why I am not even considering this dual GPU internal SLI 690 or the forthcoming 7990.

Agreed. Crossfire seems better in theory than in practice. All my future cards will be single ones. Is NVIDIA surround better supported and less problematic on the whole than crossfire?

I should of mentioned I too have Crossfired 5870's. However one of my cards is a 2GB Eyefinity 6 Edition. For games that don't work in Crossfire I have the full 2GB of video mem. For those games that do work in Crossfire, I just turn down FSAA to 2x and Anisotropy to 4x-8x. I haven't ran into a video mem issue yet! But I do have 12GB of system memory to back my graphics cards up...

I'm going to hold on until ATI comes out with their 8xxx series, and then probably wait 6 months after that.

The NVidia 685 offering is very very attractive if true, but the whole thing has just been a mess... That 690 above though!! I can feel my wallet catching on fire just reading the price tag...

Perfect card for what I need ,except for that price.