NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2-Way SLI Video Card Review

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 in 2-Way SLI

Back on March 21st, we brought you our review on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 reference card. Earlier this week we followed that up with review of that card focused on 2D Surround gaming, so those of you that have a multi-monitor setup could get some performance numbers at an ultra HD resolution of 5760×1080. Today, we are back at it with a GeForce GTX 680 review featuring 2-way SLI! The only thing better than one GeForce GTX 680 is running two of them together right?

The focus of this article will be from the single monitor point of view, so we’ll be bringing you performance numbers at 2560×1600, 1920×1080 and 1280×1024 to show you how this killer setup performs. We’ll also be taking a look at the power consumption, noise levels and temperatures that will get form a GeForce GTX 680 2-Way SLI setup.

We couldn’t find a company willing to send us a second GeForce GTX 680 for testing, so we went to Newegg and spent $499.99 out of our pocket for an off the shelf EVGA GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards. We got lucky and was able to purchase one when they became in-stock for a split second. Most people expect that review sites get everything they wish and in bulk, but that isn’t the situation. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 is still in extremely short supply and a quick look online this morning found that Newegg was sold out of all of their GeForce GTX 680 cards still. This is one of the reasons that most companies aren’t sending out extras to reviews as they have retail orders to fill!

In case you are wondering you can mix two difference brand boards for SLI as long as they are running the same GPU. Since the EVGA GeForce GTX 680 is based off the NVIDIA reference design, they will work perfectly together in SLI.

To run SLI you need a power supply that is at least 650 Watts and one that supports four 6-pin PCIe power connectors. You’ll also need an NVIDIA SLI bridge that connects both cards together.

Once the cards are installed you need to make sure to install the drivers for both cards and then enable SLI in the NVIDIA control panel. We are running GeForce 301.10 drivers and had no issues with drivers or getting SLI to work properly.

Let’s skip all the fluff and show you the test system and dive into the benchmarks!