Palit GEFORCE GTX 680 2GB Kepler Graphics Card Review

The GTX 680 launch has been a frustrating one for us, with little support from Nvidia. While they will moan that giving press decks and specs sheets is support, it doesn’t really excite our readers that much, and they want to see the cold hard facts direct from us, so while we have a few other articles showing you event coverage from the Nvidia press event, we all know that it’s all about the review and what we saw today.

So what did we see here today? Essentially, we saw a reference card with a Palit sticker, which is no fault of Palit’s as this is what Nvidia have stipulated and we know that many brands, Palit included, are working on custom versions of this card as we speak and we for one, can’t wait to see what they come up with. For a reference card, the temperatures, acoustics and power consumption were quite impressive, considering the sheer performance behind this card, but we do feel that the partners can improve on this by ten fold, and time will tell if this is the case.

Performance was something that this card focussed on, with Nvidia wanting to blow AMD out of the water, but it doesn’t look like they done it as well as we’d hoped with the 7970 OC doing slightly better across certain benchmarks. For the most part however, the GTX 680 did blow the 7970 out of the water, and can be considered now, as the fastest single GPU graphics card in the world, and on the market currently.

While it is the fastest single GPU card in the world, we can only speculate about what AMD’s plan is next, as they still have one last trick up their sleeve with the 7990 due for release soon, but full specifications aren’t clear on this and it could be a big flop, though we doubt that very much.

Performance aside, this card has brought a lot of new features to the table, with full support for Nvidia Surround from one card, SLI support, GPU Boost and much more, and this all adds to the value of the card and with that in mind, lets talk about value and pricing.

Recommended RRP pricing suggests £429 in the UK, and Palit have stuck to that by actually giving £10 off at £419.99 at Scan and more will be revealed when the product pages for these cards go live as well as further pricing from different brands too.

In terms of offering the whole package, the GTX 680 simply does that, as it runs quietly, efficiently, keeps things cool and offers great performance too. On top of all of that, it also has great overclockability which we’ve experienced first hand, and will start writing up an article for our loyal readers very soon so keep an eye out for that one. Also the fact that this card incorporates so many new technologies is fantastic and a real plus point for Nvidia, and though we have had a rant about them and the lack of support that we had from them, the GTX 680 is still an amazing card and they’ve done a great job.

All we can wait for now, is the custom cooler/overclock edition cards that will start flooding into the retail channel in the next  weeks, and we will see what we can get hold of from the likes of Asus, Club3D, EVGA and hopefully Palit too, but for now, we are pleased to give this reference based card from Palit, our “Editor’s Choice” award.