Nvidia’s GTX 680 arrives! “Faster, Smoother, Richer” – is it enough to take the Performance Crown?
A look at the cards
Nvidia has redesigned their GEFORCE logo somewhat in this professionally rendered image. You can see the connectors.
We can see that there are two dual link DVI ports, a HDMI 1.4a port. and a DisplayPort. To run 3 panel Surround off of a single GTX 680, we used two DVI connectors and a passive DisplayPort to DVI adapter. We were not able to test 3D Vision Surround as we would need the more expensive active DisplayPort to dual-link DVI adapter or else we would still have to use two GTX 680s in SLI.
Quiet Gaming
Here you can see the GTX 680 with its cover removed.
And here is the PCB.
From a top down look with the cover removed.
And now the PCB and layout.
Here is the other side.
The chip itself is quite small.
SLI and Tri-SLI
The GTX 680 is set up for SLI and Tri-SLI. We hope to cover SLI performance of the GTX 680 in an upcoming article.
The specifications look extraordinary with solid improvements over the Fermi-based GTX 580. Let’s check out performance after we look at our test configuration on the next page.
Awesome review !
Great review. I appreciate that you separated the benchmarks into their respective categories (dx9, dx10, dx11, synthetic, physx, etc.) Very thorough!
Overclocking charts directly comparing the GTX 680 to the HD 7970 were just added to the performance summary.
Great job apoppin. Thanks for covering overclocking so nicely, a lot of early reviews were rather poor on that.