Product Showcase

Product Showcase

For this article Point of View supplied two GeForce GTX 680 cards and I quickly wanted to show them to you.

The card is actually 100% based on the reference design as you can see, aside from the sticker. There's obviously nothing wrong with the reference model, in fact it's a great card in its base form alright.

The GeForce GTX 680 will come with two GB of graphics memory, that's definitely enough if you are a hardcore gamer with a monitor resolution of 1920x1200. If you plan to game on triple monitors then later on a 4GB model should become an option as well, that would definitely help you out in the uber high resolutions and with hefty AA combinations.

The GeForce GTX 680 has a maximum power consumption of 195 Watts (170W typical power draw), you'll need to power the card with two 6-pin PCIe PEG leads from your power supply. We recommend a 550W power supply to start with (with one card of course). You will notice a somewhat unusually shaped power connector, it's indeed stacked. Using a custom stacked connector design NVIDIA was able to save on the PCB footprint.

The PCB itself is based on a 4-phase power design with two added phases for the memory subsystem thus that's a 4+2 phase design. The card is PCIe gen 3.0 compatible. Going from PCIe Gen 2 to Gen 3 doubles the bandwidth available to the add-on cards installed, from 500MB/s per lane to 1GB/s per lane.

The current NVIDIA driver however only allows for PCIe gen 2.0 compatibility.

Like any high-end GeForce graphics card, NVIDIA will allow you to opt for the multi-GPU road as you may pair two or three cards in one PC -- heck even four if you are rather rich of course.