Final thoughts and ratings

NVIDIA and its partners have steadfastly refused to move the price of its premium GPU, GeForce GTX 680, in the wake of arch-rival AMD's successive price cuts to the competing Radeon HD 7970 card. With the Radeon now available from £320, or £50 cheaper than the least-expensive GTX 680s, the pressure is on for NVIDIA's partners to deliver compelling solutions that offer manifest advantages over the reference card.

GeForce GTX 680 is all about showing off the underlying Kepler architecture in its fullest, most unbridled form. EVGA's finest air-cooled example is the Classified 4GB, equipped with a fully-custom PCB, cooler, double-sized framebuffer, a decent dose of overclocking, and potential for hardware-based voltage adjustment.

Cool, quiet and eminently fast in the out-of-the-box guise, Classified is a card whose potential can only truly be unlocked by serious enthusiasts; users who dally with the EVBot controller and dial-in obscene voltages while utilising the type of cooling any sane person would find crazy.

But it's not all good for EVGA. The £500 asking price is rather steep and the usefulness of the non-overclocked 4GB buffer questionable, going by our three-screen benchmarks, meaning the Classified isn't all things to all enthusiasts. Still, our overriding feeling is that we're happy to see companies think outside the confines of the tight NVIDIA box and offer something different, and the EVGA GTX 680 Classified 4GB is that.

The Good

Cool, near-silent, and quick
Completely non-standard design begs to be pushed hard
Healthy factory-based GPU overclock
Can be made into a beast with over-voltage and better cooling
Remains power-efficient

The Bad

No out-of-the-box memory overclocking
Usefulness of 4GB memory buffer is questionable

HEXUS Rating

EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified 4GB

HEXUS Awards

EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified 4GB

HEXUS Where2Buy

The reviewed card can be purchased from Scan Computers*.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

*UK-based HEXUS community members are eligible for free delivery and priority customer service through the SCAN.care@HEXUS forum.

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Been waiting for this, shows the fans of the 7970 TOXIC what NVIDIA can do :D

Great review thanks. Great to see that you've picked up on the graphs and times per frames that people had asked for. I loved the ‘Table of Doom’ and the new info. Congrats.

Interestingly, despite the rather odd fanboy above, this actually makes the 7970 a more attractive prospect rather than less. I can have a 7970 that beats even this giant in some games for nearly 40% less of my hard earned.

Admittedly, if I was building this week, I'd get a 680, just not this one. At this price it looks plain silly.