NVIDIA GTX 680 Reviewed: A New Hope

Value
So, what kind of value does the GTX 680 deliver? Well, considering that it is supposed to be NVIDIA's flagship card (which is debatable based on our architecture analysis), it is priced pretty high at $499. Many expected the card to be selling for $550 which is the same price as the HD 7970 launched at. What should be interesting to see is how AMD will adjust their pricing to reflect the GTX 680's pricing and performance that we have seen here.

Newegg Jumping the Gun Letting us Show You All the Prices

Considering the performance that we got out of this card as well as the overclocking potential that we were able to unlock merely by using EVGA's Precision X there is no doubt that this card is a great value, even at $499. Also taking into consideration that it replaces what normally would require a much more expensive GPU or two slightly less expensive previous generation GPUs, there is no doubt that this card is quite a value.


Conclusion
The GTX 680 came to us with extremely high expectations, especially after what NVIDIA had said about the HD 7000 series. There is no doubt that the GTX 680 is definitely the best gaming graphics card on the market today, and considering the amount of performance it delivers at the power levels and heat levels that it operates on it is without a doubt the best.

The GTX 680 handily beats its predecessor the GTX 590, a dual Fermi GPU card, and also beats its competition in most benchmarks (admittedly, not all). Not only does the GTX 680 do these things faster, cooler and quieter than all of its competition, but it does it for a lower price and in a smaller package (shorter board).

Looking at some of our benchmarks, it does appear that the GTX 680 does need some work on the driver side of things just to improve some performance here or there. But from what we've seen in our benchmarks and our gaming experience, there were no poor gaming experiences with the GTX 680. We just hope that NVIDIA can continue to further improve performance in games where the GTX 680 is slower than the 7970, namely games like Metro 2033.

Taking all of the factors we've talked about, performance, overclocking, heat, power consumption and design, there is no doubt in our minds that the GTX 680 wins our Editor's Choice Award as well as our Innovation award. Yes, we're giving it two awards.