GTX 690, or two 680's?

Sadly, for really smooth 1600p gameplay, he needs a pair of cards.

I'd say either get 670 SLI and save some money or get a 690. No point in getting 680 SLI unless you like the aesthetic of two cards... the 690 will keep your power/noise/heat issues to a minimum with basically the same performance.

Go with the GTX 690, which is the best graphic card you can have -- so the best option for a future proof card, with excellent performance!

GeForce GTX 690 Review: Testing Nvidia's Sexiest Graphics Card http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-690-ben...

No such thing as future proofing.

Gtx 690 is slightly slower than two 680's because it's downclocked, however a single 690 would be the better choice because it consumes less power and gives off less heat than two 680's

+1 except two 680 out preform a 690 but i still agree with this recommendation 100% i just ordered x2 MSI 670 PE today hoping i won't regret it because i am broke now lol.

Thanks everyone for the answers.

One thing I just can't understand is: If the 690 has a slower core clock, how can it possibly run games faster than the 680? I'm definitely missing something here.

Um... the 690 is 2 x 680 on a stick and downclocked a bit. It's basically 680 SLI on one card except the clock speeds are a bit slower.

Not really. They're almost identical. Saying that two 680s outperform a 690 is like saying a Radeon 7850 with an 880MHz GPU frequency (20MHz over reference of 860MHz) outperforms a reference 7850. It's technically true, but there's no way in hell that you'd notice a difference.

Easy.... these are faster than the reference 680 and therefore significantly faster than the 690....not to mention waaay cheaper

2 x ASUS 670 DCII

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_670...

The TOP version was so designated when Asus was hand picking the GPU's during early production runs. As the line matured, this was deemed no longer necessary.

Two identical GPUs with a tiny underclock are still a helluva lot faster than one of the GPUs without the tiny underclock and are almost exactly as fast as two of the GPUs without a tiny underclcok. Frequencies are not measurements of performance anyway; frequency is just one of many factors in performance.

You mean the card that isn't available and definitely doesn't cost $420 anymore? Seriously?? Stop it.  

He/she didn't say anything about the TOP being available, just that the current non-TOP is basically identical to the TOP because GK104s don't need to be as highly binned these days (presumably due to process improvements). Also, the non-TOP that he/she recommended is available all over and at least at Newegg, does in fact cost $420:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Yes, but you have to overclock it to get the results he's talking about, and manual overclocking changes the entire dynamic of the discussion (and definitely not in favor of the 670, by the way).

The non Top is not the same though i have try both cards and trust me they are different i think the reason is the Top uses specially higher binned chip.

JackNaylorPE claims imply that the non-TOP's binning has caught up with the TOP's, but they didn't raise the stock frequency in relation to this. IDK for sure, but re-reading JackNaylorPE's post, he/ahe might have been embellishing given that he/she claimed significant performance improvements over the 690 and that it's "waaay" cheaper, which isn't really true given that two DC2 670s are only about 20% cheaper than a 690.

His posts of that sort are almost always full of misleading trash masquerading as helpful analysis. His methodology is flawed (guru3d doesn't keep results up to date with drivers like TPU's do), his information is selective and not up to date, and his presentation of "advice" is as biased as any you'll see on these forums.

The non-TOP runs at stock 670 frequencies and will perform the exact same as a reference 670. There are other 670s, like the MSI PE OC, which are cheaper, nicely overclocked, and still have good coolers - they are better options.

If you want to say "well you can just OC the 670 to TOP levels", you have just changed the discussion entirely. Most 7970s will overclock to Toxic levels and soundly beat any OC'd 670 out there. Manual overclocking always will turn the discussion heavily in favor of the 7950 and/or 7970.