I'm a lazy asshole... What else can I say...
Jokes aside, I'll be honest with you.
I got the card Monday afternoon. I finally got drivers late Monday just before 5pm. I had to take and edit all the images, which takes a couple hours and I did that on Monday along with the outline of the article.
Tuesday I was out of the office for an emergency that came up.
Wednesday I worked all day on the review as we had just one day to benchmark the GeForce GTX 690. I also wanted to include GeForce GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990 dual-GPU numbers for those that might be looking to update their card. That is the key audience for this review, so I wanted to make sure I had those numbers in the review. Sure, I have 7970's and I've already done reviews in CrossFire with them, but I was out of time.
I run Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, DiRT 3, H.A.W.X. 2, Just Cause 2, Metro 2033, Heaven 3.0 and 3DMark 11. It takes around 2 hours to run through those benchmarks on a single card at three resolutions. I run the benchmark three times and average the result. You then have to monitor power, noise and temperatures results that you have to get. It take a solid 6 hours per card. I spent from 5am to 11:30pm doing nothing but benchmarking the cards. No shower, eating left overs and standing in front of the PC for 12+ hours...
You also have trouble shooting, driver issues and unforeseen crap happening at this time. For example the red screen of death that happened to me while benchmarking and took a bit to figure out exactly what was causing it and why.
- red-screen.jpg (70.72 KiB) Viewed 9496 times
I woke up this morning at 4:30am and finished up the charts and wrote the review. End of story.
As you can see there is no time to run other cards or different monitor setups. If NVIDIA gave us more than 72 hours, then it could have been done easily. Having a big emergency come up also didn't help matters on my end.
