580 GTX, is this a good price?Also can an Extreme 6 fit 3 of them...

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 OC 4GB GDDR5 Graphics Card GV-N680OC-4GD
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4373#ov
For $420, Like New. That's a pretty good price right? I was looking at the EVGA classified 4gb 680gtx, but it's nearly $150 more. :/


I notice they take up three slots. Could an Extreme6 z77 hold three of them?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157295


Thanks a million.

I am buying everything right now. I am afraid of CrossfireX right now, with all the stuttering/runt frame/low actual frame reports. It has turned me off to them for now. I am planning on running the games I can 7680x1440, and the rest at 2560x1440. That's too bad about them not fitting. I do not have any yet, was just about to order something. The mobo arrives tomorrow.

Is it a mistake to buy two of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 OC and sandwich in between them? Hmmm.

That Gigabyte GTX 680 is a good price for a 4GB card. Beware of AMD fans trying to tell you that Crossfire is 'okay'. It sounds like you've done some research on the topic and so you know that Crossfire is literally broken with frame metering/frame latency issues, and the usual AMD driver problems where some games just plain won't work.

It seems like you are aware of this, but to reiterate:

Quote:
"However, we've also seen many games that do not scale well, and they make up a significant portion of our tests. Out of eighteen titles, five did not scale, or worse, showed negative scaling. These are not small titles, but big AAA games: Assassin's Creed 3, Batman: Arkham City, F1 2012, StarCraft II, Skyrim, and World of Warcraft. What really surprises me is that this long list is the same as the one we had with our reviews of HD 7990 "New Zealand" implementations by board partners, like the ASUS ROG ARES II and PowerColor Devil 13. So either AMD does not care or can't fix CrossFire support with these games millions of people play."
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7990/31.html


Quote:
"Where AMD has definite issues is with HD 7970s in CrossFire, and our Frame Rating testing is bringing that to light in a startling fashion. In half of our tested games, the pair of Radeon HD 7970s in CrossFire showed no appreciable measured or observed increase in performance compared to a single HD 7970. I cannot overstate that point more precisely: our results showed that in Battlefield 3, Crysis 3 and Sleeping Dogs, adding in another $400+ Radeon HD 7970 did nothing to improve your gaming experience, and in some cases made it worse by introducing frame time variances that lead to stutter. Take a look at some of our graphs on those game pages and compare the FRAPS FPS result to the Observed FPS result that calculates an average frame rate per second after removing runts and drops. Clearly the performance of the dual-card configuration is only barely faster than the single card, removing the “scaling” of CrossFire."
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Frame-Rating-Dissected-Full-Details-Capture-based-Graphics-Performance-Tes-12


Quote:
"Quite simply, AMD CrossFire is the stutterer in the room. We have talked about this issue in every CrossFire versus SLI evaluation we have published for years now. We are pleased to say it felt like stuttering has been lessened a bit with AMD CrossFire. However, it is still very much a reality with Catalyst 13.5 Beta2 on Radeon HD 7990 and 7970 GHz Edition CrossFire. First of all, we experienced no difference in stuttering between the single-card Radeon HD 7990 and two-card Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition CrossFire. The amount of stutter or inconsistency felt the same between both configurations while gaming."

"We did feel a smoothness difference between AMD CrossFire versus NVIDIA SLI. Let me describe a moment I had while gaming on GeForce GTX 680 SLI in Crysis 3 during this evaluation... It was a fluid and immersive gaming experience. The game to me felt like it was playing at 40-50 FPS. Finishing up the run-through I stopped FRAPS and it read an average of 33 FPS.

I was in awe. It felt smooth, really smooth, it felt like it was running at a faster framerate than it really was. If not for some minor lag throughout the run-through, I would have called that very high setting playable based on the experience alone, without looking at the framerate. It was a shock to see the framerate so low, I really thought it was higher as I was playing. This kind of smoothness we often experience with NVIDIA SLI. This cannot be said for AMD CrossFire. It stuttered badly at very high settings and you knew, you could feel it that it wasn't playable as it negatively affected the overall gameplay and immersion. While this is a broad statement, it stands up fairly well even though there are differences using different game engines: It takes higher framerates to get a smoother experience with CrossFire than with SLI."
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/04/24/amd_radeon_hd_7990_video_card_review/9#.UXwRJuChDFI[/quotemsg



your articels go over the hd 7990 and i know crossfire has some troubles sli has some too haveing 2 gpu's always brings some problems. btw i totaly ain't an nvidia or amd fanboy i like both company's and i just buy cards that offer the best price/performance and i don't care if they are from nvidia or amd i just look at who made the cooler. and yes crossfire does have a bit more trouble with dual gpu ing. But the ifinity technologies from amd will help him because at those resolutions you need to have more then 1 screen. nvidia is also good for multi screens but amd is a bit better then nvidi in this segment

With those resolutions the 7970s would be the best bet, unless you plan on SLI with Titans, but I doubt you're ready to spend 2k on GPUs right now (Just my guess...). 384 Bit Architecture is a major advantage over the 670/680s. Yea Crossfire is struggling atm, but at the rate AMD's driver team is going they'll have it fixed in no time. As previously stated, the 13.5 Beta drivers seem to have solved most of those issues. On a side note(IF you stick with Nvidia), you would get much better bang for your buck with 2 670s instead of 680s. You pay an extra $100 for the 680s and get less than 10% improvement in performance.

EDIT: I certainly prefer AMD over Nvidia, but I have nothing against Nvidia. I have put them in multiple builds for friends and recommended them to plenty others. But people need to remember that several of the testing software out there is Nvidia Optimized software... However, others certainly aren't.

i Totaly agree with you and yes the 670s have a lot better price/ performance than the 680 but the 7950 still is better than an 670 and an 7970 is better than a 680 (these things are facts just look at ben
chmarks)

the hd 7950 isn't better than a gtx 670. If the hd 7950 would be better than a gtx 670 it would become an hd 7970.

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 OC 4GB GDDR5 Graphics Card GV-N680OC-4GD
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4373#ov
For $420, Like New. That's a pretty good price right? I was looking at the EVGA classified 4gb 680gtx, but it's nearly $150 more. :/


I notice they take up three slots. Could an Extreme6 z77 hold three of them?


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157295


Thanks a million.