GeForce GTX 680 SLI review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

For this article ASUS dropped off a GeForce GTX 680 and I quickly wanted to show it to you.

The card is actually 100% based on the reference design as you can see, aside from the sticker. In April you may expect the customized models like the DirectCU II.

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 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 that's thus 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.

Covered by the two blue caps, Of course multi-GPU gaming is always a viable option as we'll show you in this article. 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.