Building my first PC so please help me make my choice. I heard pros and cons of both cards so please help.
680 for CUDA and 3d gaming
7970 for surround gaming
also is the 7970 a 2gb
and is the 680 a 4gb
because if its a 4gb 680 and a 2gb 7970 then the 680 gets the surround gaming part too
I always go for nvidia because of CUDA for all of my adobe creative suites software.
Hope it helped!
The GHz. edition 7970s are all 3gb except for one Sapphire card which is 6gbs.
The 7970 is also much cheaper than the 680.
680 uses less power, has CUDA, better 3D support. Cons are price, and lack luster compute performance (bested by Fermi).
7970 has lower price tag, better multi-monitor support, phenomenal compute performance. The biggest con is either lack of CUDA (NVidia exclusive tech; competes with OpenCL and DirectCompute, and more popular than both), or software lacking OpenCL support, however you want to look at it. Also, the 7970 is power hungry.
In games, the two will trade blows, though in general in lower resolutions the 680 will have a slight advantage, and at higher resolutions the 7970 really shines. Typically the 7970 gets more frames per second per dollar. Also 7970 is a phenomenal overclocker. The extra memory as well as faster memory helps with AA.
The best way to decide which one for gaming is to research benchmarks on which games you're going to play the most. I do have a slight AMD bias because of my personal experience wtih ATi 4000 and 5000 series GPUs and the value they provided. I did have a 560-Ti which I was happy with, but it eventually died, which marked my first dead GPU, replaced with 570 which also died, but both instances had to do with MSI more than nvidia.