Review: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 OC - Kepler rides again

Final thoughts and rating

Spending almost £500 on a graphics card is no small matter. Gigabyte wants you to spend almost all of that on its GTX 680 OC version. Clocked in just over five per cent higher on the core and with memory at reference speeds, the standout difference rests with the cooling. Gigabyte's WindForce 3x has proven to be a great heatsink for high-end cards and it is more than up to the job of taming the GK104 Kepler GPU underneath.

But the latest batch of NVIDIA cards add another wrinkle that can make a straight-up evaluation rather nebulous. The speed of the GPU is dictated not by its default speed but by the GPU Boost frequency. Gigabyte's GTX 680 OC consistently achieves the specified 1,137MHz core but rarely runs faster. This juxtaposes nicely against the rampaging GPU Boost clocks we've seen on recent GTX 670 OC cards, and it's one reason why this card's numbers are not as high as one would hope for. Gigabyte's doing nothing wrong, clearly, and this whole GPU Boosting issue is fundamentally sample-specific.

If it was our money on the line and we wanted an enthusiast video card to grace a system we'd opt for a GTX 670 OC and save £100 in the process. The end result is likely to be the same - super-high performance on a full-HD monitor - yet we'd have change left over for, say, a 128GB SSD and a new cooler.

Bottom line: There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 680 OC card, save for an ultra-aggressive fan-speed profile, but the enthusiast graphics card market is now such that a near-£500 outlay demands perfection in every regard.

The Good

Excellent temps (at expense of noise, mind)
Very good power-draw figures

The Bad

Expensive, at almost £500
GTX 670 OC cost £100 less

HEXUS Rating

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 OC 2GB

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