ZOTAC GTX 680 (Kepler) Video Card Review And Benchmarks

The GTX 680 is the new Flagship card for the NVIDIA lineup and it is geared for the extreme gamer who wants the absolutely best in class for his/her PC. That said the new 680 ships with a whopping 1536 CUDA Cores and 8 PolyMorph Engines to power this bad boy and has 4 64-Bit memory controllers for a total of 256-Bit and also features 2GB of fast GDDR5 Memory. Being that this card is based off NVIDIA's reference design it comes with a core clock speed of 1006MHz with a natural boost to 1058Mhz by way of NVIDIA's new Boost technology. NVIDIA bases this boost speed increase on NVIDIA's studies on a wide variety of games and applications, but results may vary depending on gameplay and game settings. This is a lot like Intel's Speed Boost technology and will be interesting to see how it works in real time.

NVIDIA goal this round was to not only be faster, but to be more power efficient as well and you can see that in the spec of the card as TDP has lowered on the flagship card thus allowing better performance, but with less TDP than the previous generation GTX 580 that required 244W of TDP almost 50W more. This will also allow an SLI setup to be configured at a lower power allowing those with lower capacity PSU to still take advantage of SLI tech. This should also translate into lower running temps and hopefully like the AMD 7 series run cooler than its 40nm counterpart the GTX 580.  these particulars are in fact is the next section of this review. Hot or Not?