The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 : GeForce GTX 680 - NVIDIA's 28nm Successor to Fermi

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Page 1 of 12 - Kepler's Laws - Faster, Smoother and Richer Page 2 of 12 - Faster with Lesser - GPU Boost Page 3 of 12 - TXAA, Adaptive VSync & 3D Vision Surround ImprovementsPage 4 of 12 - The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680Page 5 of 12 - Test Setup & The EVGA PrecisionX Tweaker Page 6 of 12 - 3DMark 11 & Battlefield Bad Company 2 Results Page 7 of 12 - Crysis Warhead & Far Cry 2 Results Page 8 of 12 - Crysis 2, Batman: Arkham City & Dirt3 Results Page 9 of 12 - Unigine "Heaven" 2.1 Results Page 10 of 12 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Results Page 11 of 12 - Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking Page 12 of 12 - Conclusion - Kepler's Laws or Kepler's Flaws?
Page 4 of 12 - The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680

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The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 - Stacking Up Against the Competitors

The reference GeForce GTX 680 card looks vaguely similar to the GeForce GTX 580. Its differences lies skin-deep with its 1536 CUDA cores and eight Polymorph Engines (version 2.0). GeForce GTX 680 also features a GPU fan made from an acoustic dampening material, reducing the noise it emits as it spins to cool the card. The second feature is its heatsink with an improved finstack for better airflow to ensure optimized cooling.The third feature are the triple heatpipes that resemble a pretzel in direct contact with the Kepler GPU for better heat transfer to the heatsink.

Apart from making the GeForce GTX 680 fast and superior to its older series, one of its design goals was to make it the quietest ever top-end graphics card and we believe they succeeded with all the efforts put into the cooler design. For a closed chamber type of cooler, the GeForce GTX 680 was miles ahead of the competition in being quiet, no matter if it was on idle or load throughout our testing,

The finstack of the heatsink that sits beside the GPU fan made from acoustic dampening material. If NVIDIA can pull out such stops for its reference card, we wonder what the card manufacturers would have to do to go above this bar that NVIDIA has set with these features.

GeForce GTX 680 and competitive SKUs compared
Model	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680	AMD Radeon HD 7970	AMD Radeon HD 7950	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580	AMD Radeon HD 6970
Core Code	GK104	Tahiti XT	Tahiti Pro	GF110	Cayman XT
Transistor Count	3540 million	4300 million	4300 million	3000 million	2640 million
Manufacturing Process	28nm	28nm	28nm	40nm	40nm
Core Clock	1006MHz	925MHz	800MHz	772MHz	880MHz
Stream Processors	1536 Stream processing units	2048 Stream processing units	1792 Stream processing units	512 Stream processing units	1536 Stream processing units
Stream Processor Clock	1006MHz	925MHz	800MHz	1544MHz	880MHz
Texture Mapping Units (TMU) or Texture Filtering (TF) units	128	128	112	64	96
Raster Operator units (ROP)	32	32	32	48	32
Memory Clock	6008MHz GDDR5	5500MHz GDDR5	5000MHz GDDR5	4000MHz GDDR5	5500MHz GDDR5
DDR Memory Bus	256-bit	384-bit	384-bit	384-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	192.3GB/s	264GB/s	240GB/s	192.4GB/s	176GB/s
PCI Express Interface	PCIe ver 3.0 x16	PCIe ver 3.0 x16	PCIe ver 3.0 x16	PCIe ver 2.0 x16	PCIe ver 2.0 x16
Molex Power Connectors	2 x 6-pin	1 x 6-pin, 1 x 8-pin	2 x 6-pin	1 x 6-pin, 1 x 8-pin	1 x 6-pin, 1 x 8-pin
Multi GPU Technology	SLI	CrossFireX	CrossFireX	SLI	CrossFireX
DVI Output Support	2 x Dual-Link	2 x Dual-Link	2 x Dual-Link	2 x Dual-Link	2 x Dual-Link
HDMI	1	1	1	1 (mini-HDMI)	1
DisplayPort	1 (version 1.2)	2 (version 1.2 HBR2)	2 (version 1.2 HBR2)	None	2 (version 1.2)
HDCP Output Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Street Price	Launch Price: US$499	Launch Price: US$549	~US$449	~US$509	~US$349

The GeForce GTX 680 has been designed for quieter gaming and when it was under load during our benchmark testing, the GPU fan was visibly quiet even when fan speed was set at 60%. Do refer to our test setup section of the article for more details on the usage of EVGA Precision, a third party utility for tweaking the GTX 680 graphics card.

The card features two Dual-Link DVI ports, a HDMI port and a DisplayPort for support of up to four displays - all natively on the GPU.

The 6-pin power connectors are staggered in position so that the release pins of the power plugs from the PSU are not aligned. This allows for easier removal of the power plugs from the graphics card. However, the design also hints of an even faster GPU variant that could take up yet another power socket with the spare space; time will tell if we're right.

9.0

The Verdict

9/10

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Compare This | Specifications

Performance 9
Features 9
Value 8.5

Excellent all-round performance

Extremely quiet for a flagship card

GPU Boost in Kepler architecture

Temperature and power consumption wasn't low but was justified with GPU boost

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The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 - Stacking Up Against the Competitors

GeForce GTX 680 and competitive SKUs compared