I'm a nerd and proud of it! I'm even calling in sick Friday to play around with my new nerd toys coming in the mail Thursday- 2 x 670 4gb's for 5760 x 1200 on 3 x 28" monitors. If you don't hear from me about the results, it's because im wrapped up in the fun that my 2 x 480's have struggled to provide in surround... lol.

Looks great, I hope you have the good 670s, and nice insides of the computer to. It almost look like u have 6 Fans running in there??

After some more playing tonight on FXAA only for 3 or 4 hours I'm not so sure my hypothesis about the GPU usage variance being less is going to end up being true. The frame rates are amazing, usually always 60+, many times around 80 or so, but my GPU usage is still no where near 99% on them all at the same time. That means there's a bottleneck somewhere, right? Other wise I don't see why they wouldn't push 100-120 on a consistent basis because the GPU power is there if they were all operating at 99%. It hits 99% and 100+ FPS sometimes, but not all that often. I don't know what the bottleneck could be, but it's not memory capacity as I don't think I ever saw it go over 1950MB.

ryu4000
Well im joining the 600 series tommorrow.Just order 3 evga superclocked 4gb 670's from amazon.Got a friend buying my 2 580's for 300 per card.

 
You get those puppies hooked up yet or what?!?!

Nah, I didn't know anything about that. What's the deal with that?

Damn it man I wish you had the 4GB version. That was the best ****ing guide I've ever seen done for a card.
 
Please, we need to find you at least two 4GB 680/670 for you to make a guide for them. I just want to know the VRAM usage under all these beautifully laid out conditions of this thread.

I don't have numbers to share yet, but I will try to get them posted Saturday.  So far what I am seeing for 5760x1080 on 670 FTW SLI is that I am running out of GPU power before I am running out of VRAM so I don't think 4GB cards will make a lick of difference with just two card SLI.
 
Example... the reason I'm saying this is for BF3 I am playing on Ultra and disabling both MSAA and Ambient Occlusion and I am still not holding a locked 60FPS using v-sync like I was hoping for.  With that setup I am only using about 1650MB of VRAM and the cards are running at 98-99% load... so it's just a matter of not enough raw power from what I am seeing so far.
 
I was thinking about ordering a pair of 670 4GB cards but I don't think it will even make any difference, since even if I have more VRAM I can't crank the games up as it is and all the VRAM in the world won't change that.
 
Speaking specifically about Surround setups, I think the ticket is to rock 2GB SLI and just dial back the settings or to go with 4GB Tri-SLI so you have not only the additional VRAM but you'll have the raw horsepower to take advantage of it.
 
And then there are some equally important numbers to consider:
 
670 FTW (x2) = $840
670 SC 4GB (x3)  = $1,455
A difference of $615...
 
There is no way in hell that the extra performance is worth it to me for that price difference.  I am most likely going to just keep my 670 FTW SLI and then when GK110 comes out maybe I will look to sell these and get a pair of 4GB cards at that point.
 
I want to end this post with one final sentiment... I AM ABSOLUTELY BLOWN AWAY WITH THE PERFORMANCE OF THE 670 FTW!
 
I am NOT complaining about how I can't run BF3 on Ultra at 5760x1080 with a locked 60fps using V-Sync... I am absolutely amazed that these two cards alone can run a game like this at such an extreme resolution.
 
Let's all be honest and agree that this thread is about nitpicking the finite details... something most of us clearly enjoy or we would not be participating in said discussion.  

Lookin forward to hearing all about it! =)

raw2dogmeat
 I thought for a sec it was at me, then I saw the times we both posted, did'nt think you could type THAT fast! Later all, 4 am gets here quick..hope to be home by 10 am and spend the rest of the weekend testing all my games in surround!! The 15 minutes I spent with the new cards tonight, they seemed to run flawlessly..I'm thrilled...was worried with the previous SC drama. I know I'm not in the clear yet, though!

 
Now I am glad I caught your post and took a second to follow up...   Looking forward to your results tomorrow!

Sweet man, glad to hear you actually noticed a difference, I thought you would.  If you generated another one of those super sweet charts to compare I wonder how it would stack up on GPU usage.
 
The only game so far that I allow to use Adaptive power is Diablo 3 because it's not even breaking a sweat even at 5760x1080 so why not save some juice.

Hello all. First post and I had to join after seeing your work. Kudos to you all and I can’t wait to see your results. My interests are very similar except that I’m running 3D surround with 3 Asus VG278H. My GTX 570 sli laughs at me when trying to run newer titles and so I’ve been trying to get adequate info as to the 600 series 4gb debate…just as you all seem to be. Not sure why the review sites are so late to the table but so be it. Many thanks for taking the time to test and report.

Definitely something going on with either one of my 670's or them in SLI configuration in general.
 
I put one of my 570's in and the comp worked fine. I put in what I'm calling my good 670, or the one that hits 1229 MHz out of the box , and it worked fine. Then I put in my good 670 with what I consider the 3rd of 3, or the one that clocks to 1176/1189. I tried to enable surround, everything locked up, and NV control panel was not responding. Tried to shut down, and it stuck on the shut down screen. I just had to hard power off, and now I'm back to trying to get it to boot again.
 
I'm going to try my 2nd card with the good one if I can get it to boot again to see if that makes a difference. I'm wondering if my 3rd of 3 cards isn't going bad on me.

thebski

Well I got off work a little early today and went to fire up the ole comp for some BF3, and I'm greeted to several of these lovely messages in a row:


It happened two or three times during the actual blue Windows loading screen. Two or three other times it would boot into Windows and would crash out and flash this blue screen after 3 or 4 minutes of me doing whatever. Then there were a couple other times when the PC just reset itself. The screen would just go black for a few seconds and up would pop the Red bios screen.

It is definitely a problem with my 670's as I have taken them out and installed one of the old 570's and it's working fine. I have reinstalled the 301.42 drivers and will try putting in just one 670 and see what happens. I hope one of them isn't going bad on me, but with the luck poeple have been having with 670's I wouldn't be one bit surprised .

I saw this post yesterday and Googled the error code, results I saw I believe were all older posts talking about page filing I believe? I had this blue screen myself yesterday 1 time only so far with about 3 hrs of gaming..only lockup so far! This is with 2 x 670 4gb's by the way.

Did some testing last night, and I'm really not sure what my problem is and am not even sure it's my 670(s).
 
It was BSOD'ing on a regular basis yesterday but seemed to do it quickest in SLI mode. BSOD's were definitely free yesterday. What would suck is it would BSOD, and so I would take out all but one card and try to reboot it. Then it refused to boot, and so it would go through the Window's repair thing that happens when it didn't boot properly the last time. It always restored to an early point, reset, still wouldn't boot so I would power off. I would then start back up and it would go through the Windows repair sequence again. This time it would say it couldn't be repaired, so I just shut it off and restarted it. Sometimes it would go then, and sometimes it wouldn't go without me putting an old 570 back in.
 
Finally, later in the day I was getting really pissed and stubborn and I just started playing XBOX while I let it boot. I had determined that if it wanted to set on the boot screen all night I would let it. Finally after a while screen popped up saying it was having problems with connectivity between an I/O device. Well I have 2 hard drives plugged in through a USB dock that have been taking a while to recognize when I load into Windows, and I had basically all of my USB ports full. So I powered off and unplugged everything from the rear panel other than my keyboard and mouse. Hit the power button and it started right up.
 
This brings me to my next story. My USB 3.0 ports on my MIV-E had started acting up big time on the rear panel. They weren't recognizing things and all that, so I found a fix online which I deleted the USB drivers, shut down, cleared the CMOS, and then reloaded USB drivers and they've been working ever since. But now I'm wondering if that isn't causing me BSOD's because I did that two days ago and I didn't get my first BSOD until yesterday (conveniently the day after I order waterblocks for these cards and decide that I'm keeping them if it does happen to be card related).
 
So at that, I plugged in the BF3 essentials which includes keyboard and mouse to rear panel, and plugged in joystick and headphones to two front panel USB 2.0's which have never given me trouble. I had all three cards in, it booted right up, played for a while and crash. So I'm now thinking well crap maybe my CPU is somehow not stable all the sudden. So I turned it down to 4.4 at 1.36 volts which should be plenty, I put in my best 670 and hooked all three monitors up to it for some BF3 last night. I played for about two hours and had no issues. Then I put in my #2 card for some SLI. I gamed for a good three hours last night in that configuration and had no problems.
 
This morning I'm going to try 3-way SLI and if I have problems I'm going to again be suspicious of my #3 card and will start testing it by itself with minimal USB connectivity and CPU overclock.
 
Hopefully I can get this problem singled out today. It's incredibly frustrating to pay top dollar for top end hardware throughout your entire system and end up sitting here troubleshooting problems while my buddy who bought my old system and old GTX 275's is calling me up asking me where I'm at and when I'm going to get online for some BF3 action.

Yea I know my hard drive dock was causing a lot of the booting issues, but I'm not convinced it was causing the BSOD issues. I'm typing this with 3-way SLI enabled right now, so I'm going to get on some BF3 and see what happens.
 
I just want to get this solved before my water blocks get here. It's not going to be so easy to "pop in my old 570" once that happens. I also took pictures of the old cards with all the accessories yesterday hoping to put them up on the For Sale forum here real soon, but I'm not letting go of them until I'm certain these things are good to go.