EVGA announces GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition

For those of you who follow our news updates here at eTeknix you may remember the Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition Graphics card that was recently released. Well now it appears Nvidia have done a similar thing to AMD, partnering up exclusively with EVGA to deliver the GTX 680 to the Mac OS X platform. EVGA seems like the sensible choice since they are the biggest supplier of Nvidia graphics cards to the American market.

This development is important because we all know that the Nvidia GTX 680 is much faster than the AMD HD 7950 when it comes to most tasks. Consequently, Nvidia now offer the fastest Mac compatible graphics card on the market.

Strangely it seems the Mac Edition EVGA GTX 680 will only be available with a PCI Express Gen 2 bus even though it does support Gen 3. The EVGA GTX 680 Mac Edition can support four concurrent displays via DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort. Other than that the specifications of the GTX 680 Mac Edition remain entirely to reference GTX 680 specifications. EVGA have listed the “key features” for your reference:

• NVIDIA GPU Boost Technology – Dynamically maximizes clock speeds to push performance to new levels and bring out the best in every game.
• Support for four concurrent displays; two dual-link DVI connectors, HDMI and DisplayPort 1.1
• NVIDIA SMX Engine – Brand new processing engine which delivers twice the performance/watt compared to previous generations.
• NVIDIA CUDA Technology – Unlocks the power of the GPU’s processor cores to accelerate the most demanding tasks such as video transcoding, physics simulation, ray tracing and more.
• OpenGL 3.2 (4.3 in Windows) Support – Support for the most widely-used open graphics standard in the world.
• OpenCL Support – Supports the latest standards in GPGPU computing.
• Boot Camp Support – Full support for Microsoft Windows operating system in Apple Boot Camp.

EVGA didn’t mention pricing but we have been told it will be priced at $599.99 on their store making it $100 more expensive than a reference GTX 680 price of $499.99. You may also want to consider the fact you can pick up many GTX 680s new, on Newegg, for $419.99 and $439.99 so in effect it is over $150 more expensive for what is essentially an identical reference design. It may still be a con at $599.99, but it certainly isn’t an Apple-con, until you put it in a Mac OS X system that is.

What are your thoughts on this new card from EVGA?

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