Thanks for the feedback, looking forward to receiving my GTX 680 on Monday :)

S!

Yah, that is what I have been reading that owners of Z68 or similar will not benefit that much except maybe the memory going quad channel and PCIe 3.0 support. I think I will wait a bit on the GPU change..the patch will tell what to do.

Here's the numbers for ArmA 2.

ArmA 2

1920x1080 all settings on very high except AA which is on high. Visibility set to 6600m.
benchmark 01 is used.

GTX580

Minimum: 14fps
Max: 34fps
average: 21fps

GTX680

Minimum: 20fps
Maximum: 63fps
Average: 35fps

A really good boost here :)

Thats an decent boost alright.

Have you tried the card with Rise of Flight if you own it? I'm keen to know how the GTX 680 fares in this sim.

I'm on Z68 Sandy Bridge 2600K @ 4.8GHz here, my sig is a joke of course :) But I've read even the GTX 680 2GB cant saturate PCI-e 2.0 bandwidth so I'm guessing I'll have no problems with my GTX 680 (that replaces a GTX 570 SC 1.3GB BTW) when it arrives on Monday.

Looking to the future, I'm not too sure if I should wait for Ivy Bridge or just go for a current Intel X79 socket 2011 platform that does have PCI-e 3.0 with an expensive but apparently very good six core i7- 3960X and jump to 16GB from my current 8GB ... I'm surprised to read that Ivy Bridge wont have a six core CPU after all and they might not be such good overclockers as expected? But I wouldn't be surprised if there was finally a six core Ivy Bridge CPU sometime down the line and mega expansive too.

But for sure once my GTX 680 arrives on Monday the next hardware purchases will be two more 28" LCD's ... I've been toying with triple screen for a long time and at one point even had two GTX 570's in SLI ready to do it, but decided against it and sold one 570.

I've read the 680 can do triple screens from the one card even with 2GB just fine.

Was hoping to do the same...
 

Darn i was thinking/ hoping to upgrade to the new 2011 sockets (similar set up to yours)... couldnt shift my current gear without losing too much money... o well

The more I read about it and think about it, I'm starting to think X79 socket 2011 Sandy Bridge E really is Flight sim nirvana with a good overclocked six core CPU and waiting for Ivy Bridge might not be the best bet? if its true that Ivy Bridge wont have a six core CPU and not as overclock friendly as Sandy Bridge, then I'll stop waiting for it and go for X79 as soon as I get my two extra LCD's together for my GTX 680 ... I'm not sure how many cores IL2 CoD can make use of? but my main other Flight Sim is FSX and it will make use of six cores as will Prepar3D once they release v 2.0 that I hope to use in the future considering that MS Flight is just a game.

PS: The longer you hold on to your current hardware the less it will be worth in the future, but you are probably having no problems in sims just now, only the impatient like me want to constantly upgrade I guess?

It looks like a 4 gig model is on the horizon.I can not read Chinese but you can plainly see GTX 680 4 gig.

http://www.expreview.com/18897.html

Has anyone overclocked the 7970 at all?

I'm curious because of the specs b/n the two cards. It would "appear" that the only thing holding the 7970 back is it's core and memory clock speeds. If it was overclocked to be closer to the GTX680 levels, I think the 7970 would beat the GTX680 due to it bigger bus size.

Chinese is easy :)
http://en.expreview.com/2012/03/26/g...red/22013.html

And 4GB from EVGA http://eu.evga.com/articles/00669/#GTX680FTW