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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,
| 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 |
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