Okay, some footnotes: I lost my voice while recording the VO, but there were a few things I wanted to add or change that I couldn’t record in time. *4 & 6 way SLI:* Craft Computing, the example I included in the footage, used the 3x GTX 690s as part of a cloud gaming server. Other valid use cases for 4-way and 6-way SLI include triple monitor 3D Vision Surround setups. When I said that it was “just a flex”, I speak from the perspective of someone who doesn’t need to run large numbers of VMs, and had also never considered triple monitor surround gaming setups as anything but an ostentatious display of wealth. *Single GPU vs. Dual GPU:* When comparing the single GK104 vs dual, I applied a small OC to the single chip setup. This was to more accurately reflect the experience of someone who had “only” bought a single GTX 680. I’d have gone higher, but my card couldn’t handle more than about 75MHz! *Drivers:* Although I’m talking about the history of a GPU from 2011 and the games it would have been played on at the time, I am using it in a modern system running Windows 10, and with 474.04 drivers (Nov 2022 security update, the latest available for Kepler). I could have used period-appropriate drivers and hardware to more accurately reflect the conditions of the times games were released, but my schedule didn’t allow it. Sorry! *Skyrim:* I said in the script that I didn’t see any of the physics glitches I’d heard about from using the game > 60FPS. I *should* have said that the only obvious glitches I could see were the weirdly fast hand movements and the flickering, *and that* this might have been caused by running the game above its intended frame rate, and was probably *not* related to SLI. I kinda said it with the on-screen text, but I wanted to be a bit more clear about it. *Doom:* I included some footage of Doom 2016 but ended up deleting the associated VO as it didn’t fit the flow of the narrative, and I feel the footage might need some further explanation. Doom 2016 was remarked on at the time as running worse on high end Kepler than on entry level GCN cards, and that still seems to be true 6 years later. I couldn’t get the game to run in OpenGL at all, but in Vulkan it varied between 20 and 40 FPS at 1080 Low. It also didn’t use the second GPU, even with adjustments made in nVidia Control Panel and nVidia Profile Inspector. *Fortnite:* At the last minute, I went back and retested Fortnite in SLI, because I’d seen someone else’s results that were very different from mine. Despite multiple attempts with different AFR modes and profiles, I still saw this massive performance regression in DX11, and DX12 didn’t acknowledge the second GPU at all. Performance Beta, meanwhile, performed very well, but soon found itself running above 200 FPS. At this point, CPU performance would be the limiting factor. *Asynchronous compute:* There was something of an uproar some years ago when AMD accused nVidia of “not even having async compute” in Maxwell, a feature which nVidia apparently *did* include a variety of as far back as GTX 780 and Titan. I don’t intend to drag up an old Red vs. Blue argument, but in the case of the HD 7970 it is a fact that async compute was something the AMD card had that the GTX 680/690 didn’t.

I Have a friend who's struggling so hard to sell his old 690 few months ago. Besides unsupported drivers, and broken SLI support, the main problem was it's power consumption. It competes with the likes of 1050 TI at the same price range of 80-100 USD which is like 3-4 times more power efficient. At that price, people would choose more efficient cards rather than glorified heater. He ended up making a nice glass case for it and decorate his walls with it.

This was back in the era where I had a GTX 460 SLI and helped a friend build a 9800 GTX SLI because they were $40 each on Amazon...oh, how the times have changed

Officially addicted to this channel

I’ve owned a 690 before, it wasn’t that bad of a card for what I played. I eventually put it in another system though and sold it. I liked the card, it was interesting, but it was aging. I’m now on a even more interesting card, the Radeon VII. I really enjoy using the card. It surprisingly aged well considering how it was hammered at the time. At 1440p high-max settings it can play everything just about.

i love the sudden transition from "foreshadowing is a narrative device-" to the gunshot intro lmao

I’ve always found this card to be really cool despite the practicality or lack thereof. Dual GPU cards just seems novel from the perspective of someone who didn’t understand computers from that time

The smarter move was buying a GTX670 immediately, a fairly great mid range card lasting 2 years at high settings, and adding a 2nd for pennies later on. My friend built a dual GTX670 machine just weeks after the cards came out, and he didn't have to upgrade for pretty close to 4 years. As he usually builds an entirely new machine from scratch every 2.5 - 3 years, he was very happy. His brother, who always inherited the old machine come upgrade time, was sad.

Seeing these older gpu's "kinda" running current games I hope gives some hope to those who can't upgrade & running budget builds now. Keeping up with the Joneses isn't viable for most people. Keep the great vids coming!

I'm surprised how great put together this video is for such a small tech youtube channel. Well done!

I used to have a titan Z watercooled and bios hacked overclocked to 1370mhz. it did very well at 1440p games I only recently upgraded to a 3090 when they launched in 2020. this video brought back alot of memories with my titan Z constant issues with SLI. Most of the time I just ran 1 GPU to eliminate crashing,stuttering and low frame times.

Very good video, really detailed, and enjoyable. Keep up the good work

"Foreshadowing is a narrative device-" jad me dying

Oh wow, only a 300 watt TDP? That's on the low end of the high end now. There are also CPU's pulling close to that now.

god what an excellent video, well done. i was shocked to see this was done by such a small channel.

good things somtimes end

I love finding small channels the second before they explode, awesome video!

12k views in 11hrs, congrats on getting some traction with YT IcebergTech! Looking forward to more videos as always, keep up the effort!

That building that fell still has a lane closed off, 1-2 years later. Still crazy that happened in my area. It's just an empty pit now and no one knows whether they're gonna give a new building permit or turn it into a memorial.

With SLI you will need heavy user to user support, trying custom SLI Bits. There are still some places out there which are into that stuff, but well, it's less ofc, but they often tend to get some results after some time. If none works, you can aswell always try SFR Mode, but it might introduce stuttering and or heavy tearing.

Nice man, youre madly underrated and I'm looking forward to see you grow like is saw randomgamingHD expanding! Keep up the nice work

Interesting review Iceberg Tech.. I actually still have my original day one purchase of A Zotac GTX 680 and the PC I installed it in. (i7 2600k) Everything stills works great for my older games. Thanks for the video!

Did you use special SLI bits in Nvidia Inspector for Skyrim or did it just work out of the box? I had a hard time getting both GPUs to work without setting other SLI bits in the driver. Appearantly "custom" SLI bits deliver better performance with less stuttering or so...most people advise to use the Fallout 4 SLI bits, since it is based on the Skyrim engine. It's really a shame that multi-GPU had to die, even aside from the high end area it was an interesting way of boosting your performance in games even with lower-end graphics cards. Just SLI them, get a better performance while paying less than buying a better GPU. They could do so much with mGPU in DX12 and Vulkan, but no developer wants to go the extra mile, since so few people have mGPU setups nowadays.

I remember 3 years back, (before the pandemic drove GPU prices through the roof)a liquidator had a bunch of these for something like $75 each, and it was a long while before I finally decided against it, and ended up buying a GTX 970 for $100 for one of my older machines. Sli was already dead, and the fact that it was only DX 11, meant that it would be limited to older games. The power consumption is also too high, for the performance you get. If you're buying one for testing purposes, or to put on a shelf as part of a collection, then it's fine, but not as a card that you will use every day. 600 and 700 series cards are also out of driver support now, so there won't be any more optimizations coming. You're better off getting a Maxwell or Pascal based card, if you're upgrading from something even older than a 690.

Is the Proton compatibility layer on Linux / Steam OS a viable workaround to play otherwise incompatible titles? If the Vulkan API on Kepler is recent enough, then translating DX12 into Vulkan and running that on the GTX 690 could become a very interesting video.

I used to 980 for 6 years, good to know it's still capable of holding its own at the end there.

I had an SLI configuraton of GTX 980, this was realy great with my 1440p monitor, in some games like the Wither 3 and Battlefield (until the 5) I had a bit more perf than a GTX 1080. V-sync is mandatory with SLI, without it frame times are just bad and you had to love tweaking game and drivers with nvidia profil inspector. BTW I still use my Ipad air 1 and it work great for what I do with it, like youtube, twich, some Google research, etc. I use it like a second screen, no need to back windows or alt-tab

We know that Nvidia started ignoring their previous generations in terms of driver updates and performance during Kepler and forever after. My friend bought a GTX980Ti for £580 after much deliberation. SIX MONTHS LATER - Nvidia released Pascal and anounced that only "critical driver support" will continue for Maxwell. Nvidia abandoned their customers who had just spent over half a grand on a top end GPU. Meanwhile, even the HD7970 and it's reincarnation the R9 280/X, were getting huge performance increased and added features via drivers YEARS afterward.

It's a real bummer that multi gpu doesn't really get supported anymore. It could have been amazing on modern cards.

I went from a GTX275 to a GTX690 and it was amazing for the games I played in 2015 or so. It only cost me $160 at the time so I was fine with it as a card as at that price it made sense. I moved on to a RX580 when GPU RAM was becoming an issue and haven't looked back. I still have the card in a backup PC that I use mostly for home theater and streaming sites.

Want to let you know when you open the app(YT) to get info on …we’ll anything.. I’ll see a new video from you and stop everything till I’ve watched it…good stuff man really good stuff.

Very comprehensive review!

I know you said you would have affiliate links to all products used in the video, I seem to be missing the one you put up for the 690. I was hoping to triple SLI them.

The latest dual-chip cards I'm aware of were custom Radeon Pro MPX cards made for Apple for the last-gen Mac Pro.

In 2012, only competitive esports players had high refresh rate monitors. But they were a thing. I remember beinQ being in all Esports competitions.

Great video. Absolutely adore the channel

Tbh most of the people that bought one of these new fall into 2 camps: People that upgraded either at the 980 Ti or 1080 TI and people who's gaming interest and standards fell significantly and will keep using it until the one game they really want to play doesn't launch.

Back in the day the reason many of us ran multiple high end cards was because we were running 3D or Eyefinity/Nvidia Surround, and when DSR came out that was an easy to upscale to 4K, early on for me it was an obsession with Crysis

hey man at 2:27 which tomb raider game is that ive always been interested in getting into the series

Just as I was binge watching some videos this turned up in my sub box. what I wonderful surprise!

Will you be using a 780 Ti or a Titan for the final Kepler review? I'd assume they've got more of a fighting chance considering they're got more VRAM and a faster gpu than the 680 and 690 have.

The sad thing is that "flagship" GPUs, doomed to become paperweights after a few years, used to cost 4 times less than now so you would feel a little less robbed back in the day...

i just received an rx460 2gb ddr5 ... is it any good in 2022 ? and i use a core 2 duo e8400, but i plan later to get a motherboard with i3 cpu, do u think this gpu fits better with my core 2 duo or needs i3 ? bottlenecks etc

So when will you get the Titan Z?

I tried crossfire with 2 radeon 380s a couple years ago and was surprised to find dual gpu support had been removed from games that previously had it. I tried apex and with 1 card I got around 80 fps and by adding the second card it increased to 140fps but it didn't feel as smooth. I didn't check the frametimes but I assume there was a lot of microstuttering.

Wait It does support vulkan Right? What if you use DXVK dlls (directx to Vulkan) and try to run those games that cant run on Kepler normally?

Hey man, I really love the efforts you are putting in these videos they are really entertaining no cap! Since you are one of the KZfaqrs that i know who knows most about CPUs I got a question, what do you think I7-4790S in 2022 and does it bottleneck a graphics like the GTX 1650 ? Thanks in advance man!

Are you colourblind? i did notice a strange visuals in color on the games. Great vídeo btw very entertaining!!

What about DXVK to run games that require the latest versions of DrectX? Could it work since the gtx690 has Vulkan support (also not for the last versions, but at least it has something)?

Good video as usual. Not much comment as my experience in crossfire is only R5 240/HD 7750/AMD dual graphics. Planning to do any videos for budget builds? GTX 760/660, or HD 7850/HD 7950? Around USD 40 to USD 60 range.

What is the game of the minute 2:25 called? i can't recognize it.

I'm not sure if I understand what do you mean by gtx690 not supporting DX12 features, because 600 series can run dx12 games.

I had the Spiderman stop issue with 5700x+3060Ti. The game is quite buggy with RT on

Another nice vid! how do you not have way more subsss?

I'm drunk rn. But aware enough that your editing and voiceover work are amazing 6 seconds (literally stopped 6 seconds in to comment this) into the video and I can hear your excitement. You love doing this, and I just subscribed because of that. It's so immediately apparent that you do this out of passion.

gtx 700 series are diying too, my EVGA 770 4gb have graphics issues with the shadows in warzone and halo infinity directly says gpu no compatibility :(

please create video about gtx590 same story like 690 but older architecture..

You are awesome men 👍 keep up the good work

Have you reviewed Ryzen 5 4600g or Ryzen 3 3200g

I thought there was way force SLI capability on games on as its just rendering technique and its based on driver's software doing the job. CrossFireX used to have this by thirdparty hobbiest making CrossFireX profiles for own titles.. Or did i miss something form the video?

The people who bought the GTX 1080/1080ti are the smart ones. Those cards still going strong to this day.

Slight correction for @6:35 Asus had a 120Hz 1080p 23 inch monitor called the VG236H available as early as 2010 and by 2011 I believe there were multiple options available. Obviously future proofing is always a bit hand wavy, but generally you can scrape a couple extra years of good performance by looking at works well in current year and going 1 step beyond it. Like right now consensus is 6C/12T CPUs are generally enough for gaming along with 32GB of ram and a card like the 3070. However, if you step the aforementioned setup up to a 8C/16T CPU w/ 64GB of ram, and a 3080 you will be able to run games on it for another year or two before future games become unplayable.

I used to play fortnite with sli 1080s and I didn't have negative performance. That was really interesting to see. Anyone have any idea why this is the case?

I thought this was a 1m/500k KZfaq channel until I read the comments, only to realize it's not, but I'm pretty sure it will quickly get to a big number if you keep up the good work

I had a dual 680 setup, from Falcon North West. It was a nice little machine but I lost driver support recently. I liked it quite a bit.

It is interesting that you saw 100% scaling in performance in Witcher 3 when using SLI. Did you have TAA turned off? The TAA option in this game for me stopped SLI scaling properly on my Nvidia Titan X Pascal cards and so neither card would do more than 80% GPU load . This got me to 3520 x 2036 (15% below 4K) at around 85-90 FPS. When I swapped for a Single Nvidia 2080TI Kingpin performance was noticeably faster than the SLI set-up. The issue with SLI at the end is all those micro stutters and poor frame pacing. A single card was the way to go.

I'm currently running a gtx1070 founders edition, and thinking about running sli, or upgrading to like a rtx2080. But currently as is it runs all my modern games great, like Halo Infinite, MW, and Cyberpunk 2077. still on the fence on what to do.

Probably the most overlooked downside of this GPU was the triple DVI output with only a single mini DisplayPort. Heck, one of the three DVI ports was DVI-D so you were even more down bad.

i rember getting decent performace on alot of games when i had a 780ti which was still keplar. i got a fairly solid 60-75 on witcher 3, 45ish in hellblade. If i still had that card it would be interesting to see if the performance is still that same after 3 years of software updates. I did have an asus rog card with a modded bios that probably added 15% over stock.

I remember having a GTX 770 as my first ever GPU (the 770 is just a rebranded 680), I remember wanting to get a second one at the time because the 770 couldn't quite get 60fps ultra on BF4 at 1080p, the thing that put me off at the time was the constant complaints of "micro-stuttering" when using SLI, apparently the frame pacing would just be terrible for many games people tried. Seems like a gimmick looking back, kind of like rollerblades or something, like a dated PC gaming concept. Cool video :) brought me back

What game is that 2:26?

As someone who bought Kepler back in 2012, I bought 4x GTX670 cards and did triple SLI + Physx on them. At the time 2GB seemed fine, and it was. They where also faster than the AMD compitor. The AMD Finewine thing wasn't a known thing in 2012, the first generation that really applies to was the 7000 series, but in 2012 the 680 beat the 7970 and the 670 beat the 7950. You've also got to remember that during this time period the 7970 and 7950 where plauged by a red screen bug that would randomly occur. No one made a mistake in 2012 buying Kepler.

I had purchased a second 660 TI for SLI purposes back in the day. It never really worked the way I had hoped it would, and in fact I felt like my performance suffered in more games than it improved. That being said, I was very hopeful for the future of SLI... a bit too hopeful. To this day I still think that SLI could have been extremely useful for lowering the barrier to entry for VR (being able to use two older GPUs for cheap instead of buying one high-end GPU.) It seems NVidia was doing work to support per-eye rendering with SLI, but it happened at the tail end of SLI's lifespan and was thus canned before it really had a chance.

Just placed ad searching for GTX 690 however there is non in my country :/ Want one for collection

Honestly I'd've gotten a 980Ti instead of 2 980s. My brother had one that ran 4k60+ High/Ultra like a champ, and it overclocked to 2.1 GHZ on air, it was a beast. He had it until 2018 when it burnt out from the extreme OC.

I still have my own 690 however it’s now a collector’s item, I had replaced it when I got 2 980 cards in SLI … but I’m keeping it

I think you would perhaps need to use older period correct drivers but there was a brief time when you could use one of the gpu's on a dual gpu card as a Phyxs card in Batman games,etc.

I wonder how the 690 aged compared to the HD 7990. I had a friend who had one of those long been consigned to the bin which is a shame I'd have loved to benchmark it.

one thing ive noticed with spider man is that if you don't have it on an SSD or something faster than a spinning mechanical drive even good cards can be handy capped by loading into areas swaped it from my hard drive to my SSD and the issues went away

TBH, dropping SLI support sort of makes sense, especially from economy pov, but it also limits the usability of older cards. If look at it this way, cards like RTX 4090 are sort of a replacement for things like 4080 SLI that would have been a thing in the past. People often fail to notice that just a few years ago the top of the line was not a single top tier card but having 2-3 of those. That was the biggest beast you could get. Now? You can get 4090, slam water on it and push it as far as it goes but that's the limit. Anyways, the catch here is that older cards could still be usable in SLI. Even if a single card did not perform that well anymore, using two of those could often be cheaper than the new card, make the availability a little higher and most of all, it would actually be the best reusability scenario, better than recycling. Basic 1070 SLI is on pair with 3070, Strix 1070 OC in SLI is around RTX 3080 performance in most applications. Well, unless you play something that does not support multi GPU setup. Just imagine that, if we still were doing SLI with good support, in the GPU shortage after 2020 we would still have an option to run 10 and 20 series in SLI even though 30 series was hardly available. Getting dual 3080 would be a good alternative to 4080/4090, especially considering the prices and availability. This would let us use older generations at least a generation or two more before they become a scrap metal and when they do, they are a real paperweight. If games can't be even played on 2/3 way SLI, then the GPU is worth scrap. So why does it make sense? First and foremost, competition. If SLI was viable option, then new generation would have to compete with used market of old generation. Getting two slower, used cards might be cheaper and much more available than getting a new one. Secondly, optimizations, more corner cases, the overall complexity of development for SLI. I think that if anything like that should be done, it should be handled by Nvidia/AMD/Intel only, no special code on the developer's side. Multi GPU should really work as a single GPU from the game perspective and everything else should really be handled by the drivers and firmware. Otherwise it does not make sense if one game can get almost 100% boost, another will get nothing.

14:58 "SLI is just an SLI-ability" oof

Hello! CRT ran at way over 60hz and I was able to run crazy resolution on an nec CRT before 4k was a standard.

5:20 yup, thats the physics bugs you get when trying to run a bethesda game over 60FPS, the flickering is actually just your character going into swimming mode for 1 or 2 frames and then returning out of it right after, back and forth

great vid !!!

This GPU can't be more outdated...

I had the GTX 680 and it was the 4gb version from Leadtek. It was a pretty decent card when I bought it in 2013 but by 2016 it was starting to show it's age. I replaced it with the GTX 1060 and wow what a jump in performance that was.

I remember beating all those pre-2016 games on 650 Ti. Those were good times, man.

How do you always nail it!!

Still using this card and its almost 2023 now. I am mostly playing older games though.

multi gpu training mode [force alternate frame rendering ?? 1 ou 2 ??

I ran 2 GTX 285s in SLI with an i7 965 and had high frame rates, but always experienced micro-stuttering. When I upgraded to a single GTX 780 years later the micro-stuttering disappeared.

I had dual 690s. It was the first NVIDIA card that actually looked like a high-end card, and was the first card to have that metal aesthetic that seems to have carried over the years. For power, I used (and still use) a Corsair AX1200i. Practically speaking, it was one of the only cards that had three DVI ports (in a time when Display Port and HDMI were still new on cards), but did have mini-DP. These cards carried me through the beginning of the pandemic, and by that point I had replaced my 4-monitor setup with a single 55" 4K panel, so I needed an upgrade. Eventually settled on dual Strix GTX 1080 Ti's.

Still have a fully working GTX 295.

I grabbed a 690 on release for my 2700k, spent a while waiting for them to announce it or I was going to pull the trigger on two 680's. It was a lovely card for running at 1440p at the time. Its downfall though was the 4gb of Vram. It only took about a year for that to become the real issue, as the stutter from swapping out assets started to get pretty bad. Had it been 4gb for each core it would have been able to pull its weight for a good while longer for me. Still, it always looked great, even if it was a bit more heafty then I would have liked.

Games have to be written to use sli, they started dropping that in 700 series, by my 980ti, my old 670x2 sli, in bf3 got 120fps, and the 980ti same (at 1080p). That why I did not huy a 2nd one on my x99 sli matx board..(seeing death support in games).

damn how did u get 4.6 ghz all coreon 5600g

Beautifully done, I can only imagine how much work this took to accomplish. I've stuck with a 660Ti until 2015 and bought a 980. I was able to cover a third of the price by selling the trusty 660Ti. Then I moved to a 1080 during the mining craze for a ridiculous price and now I'm on a 3070 to see how the prices will behave in the future. 4080 seems like a total rip-off and a 4090 is an unjustifiable purchase for something to play games on. Plus my 3070 is a Noctua edition, I'd love my next card to be of the same type. Maybe I'll give AMD a shot, I'm still a little sour about the HD2900XT.

All the flickering is caused by Skyrim itself. The engine totally collapsed trying to play on my rx5600xt and had to cap it

Skyrim had problems (and probably still does) around the 100 FPS mark or above. The cart may up-end and prevent you from getting through the intro and tutorial. Stuff on shelves in stores may randomly fly at high enough speed to damage you, typically when you first enter the room. The day and night cycle may become out of sync with the ingame clock; which is just bizarre since you'd think those were the same thing; by that I mean the sun may set at 9 AM ingame time. Slightly higher than 60 isn't obviously broken. Also you may have random water-noises whenever you are close to the water elevation and standing on solid ground.

I remember how disappointed I felt after I bought a Blu-Ray burner and the industry decided it was time for optical drives to go away.