Whichever your preference of graphics card manufacturer, whether you sit with the green team or the red, both factions will serve you extremely well. If I were forced to choose between the two as a single graphics card, the KFA2 GTX680 wins out. It wins in all areas: quieter, cooler, faster while consuming less power. For that it deserves considerable praise.

However, dual card setups and higher have to go with the better scaling AMD CrossfireX setup. The NVIDIA configurations simply could not compete with AMD in the scaling of single vs multiple card setup. While it could be argued that I was using an older driver (PCIe 3.0 enabled) for the NVIDIA setup, a quick and dirty run using the latest drivers showed comparative results. Any more than a dual card configuration and it becomes less clear as it would depend entirely on your setup and choice of game or benchmark.

Some games favour AMD while in others, NVIDIA have the clear advantage. What is obvious though is even a 30" 2560x1600 screen does not warrant a triple graphics card setup, be it the HD7970 or GTX680. The performance gains offered at this resolution, even with Ultra settings applied are so small that you would be very hard pressed to physically notice the difference other than for benchmarking purposes. The diminishing returns only worsen when a fourth card is added. To make matters worse performance was often lesse with four cards than three! I'm sure future driver revisions would improve performance but I cannot stress more clearly that unless you intend of running Eyefinity or NVIDIA Surround with multiple, large screens then you would simply be wasting your money with a quad setup from either camp.



So while the AMD cards scale better and the NVIDIA card is the current single GPU performance king, it is NVIDIA who have the quiter and less power hungry card. In quad configuration both setups consume a serious amount of energy. You will need nothing less than a 1200W PSU for a quad setup with a 1500W recommended as a minimum should you decide to push the cards as far as they will go. That is going to make an almighty dent in anyone's electricity consumption but if you can afford to buy four of these flagship graphics cards, it is unlikely you are going to worry about the electricity bill. Four AMD cards are cheaper to buy, costing around £1500 compared to NVIDIA's £1776 and at the settings used today appear to work better when paired together.

The story doesn't end there though as the NVIDIA setup ran significantly quieter than the AMD setup. This could be because of throttling issues due to excessive temps ensuring NVIDIA's cards temperatures and therefore fan speed was kept artificially low. To counter this I set both setups fans to their maximum and both setups were extremely loud at full tilt. It has to be said though that the NVIDIA cooler was quieter than AMD albeit slightly and with four cards sandwiched together, whichever setup you choose, noise will be an issue you will have to endure I'm afraid.

If you happen to have around £2k laying around to buy these mammoth GPU setups with change leftover for PSU to run them, you will certainly have the bragging rights to put anyone in their place. If however you do not have large multiple screens to run and a heavily overclocked CPU to feed them then I fear many will be sniggering behind you back because what four graphics cards can do, the smart money would be spent on a Crossfire/SLI setup which uses just two GPU's and as we have shown today often performs better.

With regards to today's samples; the KFA2 cards are very good, clock equal to other GTX680's we have tested and come presented in a well constructed, if somewhat uninspiring package. Price wise they are very competitive against other reference GTX680 cards and thus are likely to attract attention. If you are in the market for a GTX680 then you could do a lot worse than the KFA2. For these reasons the KFA2 card is granted our Silver award. Not the best GTX680 out there but it is worthy as a reference card and beats the AMD equivelent in terms of performance, power consumption and noise.



I was extremely tempted to give the GTX680 SLI setup our Elite award, simply because they are ridiculously fast. I will however refrain from doing so because while 2 and 3 cards do perform extremely well, they are out stripped in raw multi GPU frames per second performance by their AMD equivalents, the HD7970. Moreover, both multi GPU configurations, be it 3 or 4 card AMD or NVIDIA setup, simply does not offer any worthwhile improvements unless you are the most hardcore enthusiast who craves every last point from a benchmark or have multiple screens with which to fully utilise the raw GPU processing power.

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net. Thanks to Overclockers UK for providing today’s review samples. Buy the KFA2 GTX680 2GB GDDR5 HERE.