This is not nvidia answering back. This is EVGA attempting to stand out from other vender competitors. As for the 7970ghz edition, I dont expect to much from nvidia so soon. First impressions are long lasting and the high opinion of the 680 is set. Nvidia is in a great position to make a lot of cash and profit where AMD cannot threaten it. If a price war broke out, nvidia has the upper hand. We dont even know how well the new ghz AMD card will perform in the market. if you see nvidia prices drop then you know AMD is doing well. Its always a good indicator. Nvidia can compete no problem even if they have to lower prices. The gk104 is a huge massive success on every front so far. They are soon to release the 660. If things continue like they have it will be another knock out. Riding on success, Nvidia will quietly prep an attack for the holidays. Strategy is important and a new faster card for Q3 makes little sense. Its typically a slow quarter for them. Why waste resources now when you can really end the year in a bang creating hype and excitement to carry on to the next year.
As for the article.......
this review just makes the card very very unappealing. Could it be that doubling the RAM hurts the clocks? People really have misconceptions about how RAM works, increasing the bandwidth for overclocked 680s is much more responsive than doubling the RAM amount especially since the ram is limited to a 256bit bus. It would be a very different story if the doubled Ram also doubled the bus to 512. This would remove all bandwidth constraints totally. But just doubling the ram in the same constricted bandwidth will not help much of any. With the gtx680 your core overclocks must be complemented with memory if you want to have the most gains. Ideally it would be beast to keep the ratio as close to the same as possible. Ram speed to clock speed is about 6 to 1. 6000mhz Ram to 1000mhz core clock. So this would mean every 100mhz overclock you need 600mhz memory to stay true to the ratio. Once the overclocks start breaking that ratio, your bandwidth constraints kick in limiting the results. This classified review is an example of just that. Its like wow!!!!
I found a few tings in the article interestingly shocking....
Quote:
With the GeForce 600 series things have become a bit harder for NVIDIA’s partners. As we briefly mentioned before, NVIDIA is shying away from hardcore overclocking with the GeForce 600 series. Specifically, there are two things going on:
Partners wishing to have a card with a TDP over 195W (i.e. a base power target 170W) must use a custom board with suitable power circuitry. NVIDIA won’t allow partners to ship higher-power cards using the reference board.
Software overvoltage control is forbidden.
These rules impact two classes of cards. The first are heavily factory overclocked cards using the reference PCB, which goosed the GPU voltage to hit their high factory overclocks. Partners that wish to ship heavily overclocked cards will now need to bin to stay within NVIDIA’s power requirements. Meanwhile the second class of cards impacted is of course overclocking-focused cards like the GTX 680 Classified. Voltage control becomes necessary beyond a certain point, and since NVIDIA is requiring custom PCBs and disallowing software voltage control EVGA had to get creative.
Read more at
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6096/evga ... L7dY0Az.99does this mean the MSI lightnings will not get the over-volting after all? its really concerning. What is up with this? There could be something up with this, and it could be big. idk, maybe it is EVGA hogwash. We really need to investigate this.
Apoppin, wonder if you could get with someone from nvidia to see if there is any truth to this and what is going on. Perhaps its just EVGA trying to sell more hardware. But its smelling like something went down.
