Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 OC edition review - Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

The NVIDIA Kepler launch has been a rather successful one. The card series simply is a strong performer with some really good new features. Performance wise it will beat the competitions Radeon HD 7970 in most cases with an exception here and there. Sometimes a huge win, in other tests the performance remains close or is a notch better.

Overall the card is a nice performer, there's not a game out there that it can't deal with. Anno 2070 at the best quality settings and 4xAA pushes 93 frames per second on average at 1920x1200, and still 59 fps at 2560X1600. In Crysis 2 we end at an average of 64 FPS in 1920x1200 with Ultra quality settings and that high resolution texture package and 4x AA.

Battlefield 3 is another example, with all eye candy opened up in game and again at 4xAA the card still pushes 59 FPS at 19x12 and that makes it the fastest single GPU based graphics card on the market.

The Dynamic Clock Adjustment technology is a little weird to observe, it however is a clever trick for the card to clock a little higher when the power envelope justifies it. With a reference card baseclock of 1006 MHz and the "Boost" clock at 1058 MHz there's a little more room to play with. Interestingly the card can break away from that boost clock as well. This Dynamic Clock Adjustment technology is also a big factor as to why the GK104 is behaving a littler better in some games than others. Regardless, the new technology works well.

The 28 nm Kepler transition also brought a better power envelope towards the card. The card board power is rated at 195 Watts. Our measurements have shown that (while gaming) we use roughly 170 Watts, so we certainly have nothing to complain about. NVIDIA did now disclose the idle power consumption of the card, but again we can tell you that with the GTX 680 installed this card was consuming very little power. In fact based on historic data we collect the idle power consumption was the lowest ever for a PC with a dedicated card installed.

Gigabyte's own customized version of the card in the form of the OC edition with WindForce cooler makes the GTX 680 even a little better at several fronts.

See, thermals on the reference product are within baseline, but I did find them on the high side. On the reference cards you'll see the idle temp average at roughly 40 Degrees C, the peak heat levels can close in towards 80 Degrees C.

With the WindForce cooler IDLE sat below 30 Degrees C and under full load we got less then 65C on the GPU -- in gaming simulated stress test.

The noise levels -- again on the reference products we stated that they are okay. In desktop and idle mode you will not hear the card, it really is silent. Under hefty gaming load however you will be able to hear the product. The WindForce cooler has three fairly low RPM fans, and as such we rated the card at 40 DBa noise pressure, and that, really, is very nice for a high-end graphics card alright.

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 offer a lot in terms of the feature set. The card is fine-tuned on noise levels making it silent, the GPU temps remain absolutely good. And then there's the overall design, the customized blue PCB with the Ultra Durable technology applied to it. The card comes factory overclocked (albeit a little) and then the WindForce cooler certainly promises what it should deliver, good temps and noise levels.

Manual overclocking wise we had hope to get a little higher, but then again 1250 MHz is not disappointing, it drives to the product into even higher performance regions. It's good to see that the GTX 680 now supports gaming with three monitors with one card, here we do think that 2 GB of graphics memory would be on the shy side though. Well, a little birdie told us that a 4 GB model is in the pipeline as well. The new TXAA mode is something to be further explored in the future, and if the NVENC gets as widely supported in other software as we have tested with MediaShow Espresso, it can haul the proverbial toosh.

Currently the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 2GB OC edition is around the 500 EUR marker, and if we take out pricing of the equation then the product definitely a solid contender in today's graphics card arena. As such it comes recommended by Guru3D.

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